Short advice from Katie McManus on preparing client-facing work for a vacation: decide and communicate your availability, designate an alternate contact if needed, and give clients sufficient advance notice so last-minute messages don’t turn into emergencies that spoil the client experience or your time off.
Chapters
So there are a few things that are super important for you to do when you're planning a vacation. Figure out what kind of communication you need to have with your existing clients. Are you going to be unreachable? Is there someone else that they can reach out to if they need help? And figure out how much advance warning they need that you're going to be off for whatever amount of time you're going on vacation for. You always want to think about what that customer or client experience is. Something that can make it go badly is if you send an email on, say, a Thursday night saying, hey, client, so tomorrow's my last day in the office before I go away for two weeks. Do you have any questions before I do this? Otherwise, I'll see you in two weeks. Right? Your client may not see that email until Friday afternoon. And at which point maybe they have some major questions and then it either becomes their emergency or your emergency. And if it's their emergency, you have an unhappy client. If it's your emergency that's eating into days of your vacation.