How to hand over your todos before a holiday

The week before a holiday is when your personal task list suddenly has to make sense to someone else. Everything you carry in your head, the client who is waiting, the invoice that needs chasing, the report due while you are away, needs to land somewhere a colleague can find it.

A handover note does that. Done well, it takes about thirty minutes and means your phone stays quiet.

Start from your own list

If you capture your tasks as you go, most of the handover is already written. Pull up everything open and sort it into three groups:

1. Must happen while I am away. These go in the handover.
2. Can wait until I am back. Move them to your first days back, and tell the people waiting on them.
3. No longer needed. Delete them, now, while you have the context.

The second group is the one people forget to communicate. A client who is told “I will pick this up on 5 January” is much happier than one who finds out from an automatic reply.

Write each handover item so it stands alone

Your own captures are written for you. A colleague needs more. For each item that must happen, add:

• What needs doing, and by when.
• Where the files or messages are.
• Who to contact, and how.
• What “done” looks like.

Send December invoice to Northwind by 22 Dec. Draft is in Finance > Clients >
Northwind. Contact: Asha. Done = invoice sent and logged in the sheet.

Name the person, and ask first

A handover is an agreement, not an email. Ask your colleague before you send it, walk through the urgent items together for ten minutes, and agree how to reach you if something truly cannot wait. Then send the note so they have it in writing.

Write an out of office that matches

Your automatic reply should name the person covering and the date you return, and match the handover. If the two disagree, people will email the wrong person.

Come back to a list, not an inbox

The day before you leave, add a few dated todos for your first morning back: check the handover, thank the person who covered, pick up the waiting items. In Jot, a line such as “check handover with Ravi jan 5 9am” becomes a reminder on your first morning. Combined with the Today screen, that gives you somewhere to start that is not three hundred unread emails. For the daily habit that keeps a list like this in shape, see how to plan tomorrow in five minutes, and for the end-of-day version of the same idea, see how to build an end-of-day shutdown routine.

Jot is on the Microsoft Store.

Jot is a quick-capture app for Windows: one hotkey, one line, back to what you were doing. What it is, or what is still unproven.