The Office Depends on You: What Piles Up When You're on

Everything that only you set in motion piles up: invoices, mail, enquiries and callbacks. Two weeks of tally marks show you which of these can't wait. One page by the phone then tells your stand-in how to handle them while you're away.

What piles up in the office when you're on vacation or sick?

Everything that only you set in motion piles up: writing invoices, opening the mail, answering enquiries and returning calls. Who writes the invoices and opens the mail when you're away? As long as it isn't written down anywhere, nobody does. Your team keeps working. At this one point, it just doesn't know where to start.

Here's an example. A customer calls and wants to move their appointment. Your colleague can't see your calendar. She writes the number on a slip of paper and asks the customer to be patient. When you get back, you find a stack of these slips, and behind each one is a customer who has been waiting days for an answer.

Your people aren't doing anything wrong. So far, you're the only person who knows every process. When you're out, that knowledge is out with you.

How do you find out in two weeks what can't wait?

For two weeks, you keep a tally of every office task that lands on your desk. I use two weeks instead of one because some things only come up every fourteen days. Anything monthly, like payroll documents, you add from your calendar.

Each line gets three things: the task, how often it comes up and when it has to be done. Then you sort every line into one of three groups: right away, within a week or after you're back.

Here's how that looks. An incoming invoice with an early-payment discount goes in the first group, because every day of delay can cost you the discount. A quote a customer is waiting for goes there too. Filing delivery notes can wait a week.

You can tell what has to be done right away while you're sick with one question: is someone outside waiting, or is a deadline running? If neither is true, the task can wait for you.

Where do you write down what your stand-in needs to know?

You write it on a single page, kept somewhere everyone in the business knows: printed in a folder next to the phone and saved as a file on the shared drive. One page is enough because only the first group goes on it. Everything else waits for you.

Every line answers four questions. What needs doing? By when? Where are the documents? Who decides when something is unclear? Your stand-in can be a colleague or someone from outside. What matters is that their name is on your list.

You check whether a line is detailed enough against one standard: someone else can finish the task with it without asking you anything. If you want to see where paperwork ties up your hours in the first place, read Getting Rid of Paperwork in Your Business: Where the Hours Really Go.

You run the test while you're still around: your stand-in handles the first group for one week. Every question they ask you points to a line you need to write more clearly. If you're the only one who understands the list, it doesn't cover for you yet.

Your next step: put a sheet of paper next to your phone today and write the first line of your tally. In fourteen days you'll have everything your cover list needs.

Some tasks on this list run the same way week after week. In the long run they may not need a stand-in at all, because they can run on their own. To see whether that first step starts with you, take the free challenge.