1 | 19 | Develop a back-up strategy for sick days and vacation leave

Hi there! I'm Marian Knopp, the Online Business Systemizer at marianknopp.com.

The Productivity Tip of the Day™ is: Develop a back-up strategy for sick days and vacation leave

Stay tuned to the end of this episode for a special announcement. I'm super excited about it, but back to the tip...

Develop a backup strategy for sick days and vacation leave. This is really obvious when you are not working, can things still get done? Of course, they can if you outsource and you develop a backup strategy for when you have to take a sick day, or you're on vacation, but things still have to get done.

Now some of you solopreneurs, you just go ahead and take the vacation, you don't worry about doing anything while you're away, which is fine if that's your business strategy, totally cool. But if you're the kind of person that wants to be working and continuing to do whatever your goals are, this is really important. And it's especially important if you've started to scale your business, maybe you have a team. It's important to have strategies in place for when your team members are sick, or they need to go on vacation, or you do, as well.

And so the way that I would recommend doing this is, if you have followed along and you have been writing the procedures, and you know what role has to do that task, then you will be able to just take those procedures for that role and have somebody else be the backup while they're gone. Now this can be done in a lot of ways. I can't read your mind and know what kind of business you have, so if you are just solo, you're running solo, but you want to have somethings done, you can just hire some temporary freelancer to, maybe get go on Upwork or Fiverr or something to do some tasks while you're away so that when you come back, you've got some things ready to go for whatever you're working on. So that's one way, that's on the light side.

Now if you've got a good business going, maybe you have a team member or a few team members in place, then you can have a conversation with them and say, "Hey, when I'm not here or when I need to take a day off, could you do this?" And when you look at your task, you look at your routines, and all the things that you have to do on a regular basis, you can tell what is really important to get done while you're away versus what could wait until you get back. Some things are very personal so it's not so much important that somebody else do it while you're away, maybe they wouldn't be able to if it's something like writing an email in your voice or something like that, then you could do things ahead of time, of course, that's another backup strategy, is just loading up ahead of time, and scheduling things out so while you're away, it's not even noticeable that you're away.

Or, you can have someone else do it at that time, and so I hope that as you've been drafting out your workflow and figuring out all the things that you can outsource, you think about the time that you won't be working, and obviously, some people have different dreams. Some people would like to have that like dream passive income life, where they've like built a business, and they've outsourced it all, and now they're just like living off of the residuals, and that's great if that's what your goal is. But realistically, most businesses, you have to put in the work, you have to do a lot of different things before you can take time off.

And so it's important though, as you're going through the regular day-to-day, that you have a plan in place should something happen, should you have a family emergency, maybe you get sick, maybe you have a vacation coming up. I think it's really important to be realistic about that. And if you think about in the past when you've prepared to go on vacation, how productive you felt because you've kind of tied all of those loops. It's just a good exercise to go through that on a regular basis because you'll have that feeling of knowing where all your ducks in a row are.

So that's my tip for the day. Think about what is your backup strategy for sick days and vacation leave. Vacation leave, of course, is stuff that you can predict, you know when the time is coming. Sick leave, however, is those like sudden, you didn't know it was coming, you can't plan for when you're going to be sick, or when you are going to have to stop working for a temporary amount of time. So it's important to have a strategy for both scenarios, and what that would look like, and how you would delegate accordingly.

So hopefully I gave you enough ideas to get you thinking about those things. If you're currently prioritizing writing your procedures so that you can eventually outsource to a virtual assistant, let's chat. Schedule a discovery call on my website at marianknopp.com, and I can walk you through some of the best practices. And if you're interested, I can actually help you get all that documentation done faster.

Next week, I'll share the last tip in the season finale of this summer's productivity tip of the day series. It's the tip that everyone has been waiting for and asking about. How to manage distractions and interruptions, so I will be giving you that tip and lots of other bonus tips in that episode. So stay tuned for that. That's coming out Monday, but my special announcement is that I will be doing a special bonus live episode on Tuesday, July 16th, at seven p.m. Eastern time, that is four p.m. Pacific time. You can join me live and I will be talking about what went well, what didn't go well with this podcast with the YouTube channel, with the Facebook Live show. I will be talking about all of that and I will be doing a Q&A session, as well. So you can ask your questions live, you can ask your questions ahead of time, and I will answer them so that you can catch them on the replay, as well.

So I'm super excited about that. I'll also be going into some of my musings about what I think will be coming up in the fall. I have a lot of thoughts on that, and obviously, my lessons learned is going to influence what my next steps are, so you can take a look at that. So it's going to be a bit of a longer episode because I'll be diving into all of those details, and I will be answering all your questions.

So if you want to join, you can find my Facebook Live, it has been posted on my Facebook page, which is at https://www.facebook.com/marianknoppllc, so you can find the live there. You can click the button to get reminded, and that means that Facebook will let you know right when I'm going live. You can schedule it in your calendar and you can join me on Facebook Live. And if you can't make it, still go to the page and comment with your questions that you have about this experience, or about productivity, whatever your questions may be, go ahead, throw them in the comments, and I'll make sure to get to them next Tuesday night.

So I'm looking forward to that. I'm super excited about sharing all of these little thoughts and lessons that I have learned in these 19, almost 20 episodes. So I hope to see you guys next Tuesday night.