Freelancers need time off too

How you plan, document, and communicate your time off as a freelancer can go a long way to retaining clients and providing them peace of mind.

How to handle planned time off

Start asking questions

This is a great time to step back and review the state of your business.

During one of Loom’s Funkey Monkeys (aka their all-hands meetings with a more interesting name), our CEO Joe Thomas got a question about what types of questions Loom’s investors ask him during board meetings. Here’s what he said:

Our investors are there to hold a mirror up to us and our business.

I really like that description because when you’re on the inside it can be hard to see the full picture like an outsider does.

I wrote a bunch of questions that I asked myself out loud. I’ll include them 3 of them below and the rest in the Notion template.

• Are you happy with your current clients? Should you drop any high maintenance or low paying clients?

• What needs to ship before you leave? What’s your plan for getting this over the finish line?

• If you get a lead on a new prospective client, when can you start working with them?

Try and anticipate the types of questions your clients will ask when you communicate your upcoming plans with them.

Create a document

Nearly everything I do for my clients comes in the form of a document.

• Need me to build a new campaign? I create a document

• Asked me to research something? Document

Going out of office is no different.

Documents are great because they’re one place that contains all the information about the thing you’re doing.

You can and should pack way more information in a document than you send in a Slack message.

I’m partial to Notion but you can do this anywhere you’re comfortable. The tool is less important than the content.

Use my OOO Template

I spent time creating an Out of Office (OOO) Document for my clients and wanted to share it with you lovely people.

To me, a good OOO Document answers the following questions:

• What are the dates?

• What happens if something breaks? Who should they contact?

• What’s the status of current projects?

• Who’s the DRI (directly responsible individual) in my absence?