WilliamMayor

I'm a freelance web developer, I work from home, in London (UK). I tend to have 2-4 clients on the go at any one time. I keep my time very flexible, I have a young child and I want to be able to do parent visits to the nursery, and trips out etc.

All this means that I don't tend to schedule my week with my clients in any meaningful way. They'll say what their priorities are and I'll try to work as quickly as I can on those features, but I try to avoid deadlines (where possible).

Recently I went on holiday for a week. It struck me that I had no process for communicating my holiday plans. No structure for communications whilst I was away. No fallback or out-of-hours support. I phoned/emailed my clients and they all said that I was to have a great time, so no big deal this time.

Next time I go on holiday I'd like a clear plan for how to do it. This might not be something that my clients ever see, it might just be a process that I follow. Or it could be a bigger system; perhaps I'll find someone else to triage issues whilst I'm gone? Or something else?

What do you do?