Ask HN: How do startups/lean teams successfully handle mat/pat leave?

I&#x27;ve done this. I lead a lean team and took parental leave last year.<p>* Start now by trusting your team with absolutely anything you can. For about 2 months before my leave, I was extremely explicit with my team that I was attempting to deprecate myself. I wanted feedback on what they thought were risks.<p>* Consider using the time for someone else to &quot;test try&quot; your job. Think someone would be interested in being a manager, it&#x27;s their time to try it. You will need to be explicitly clear that they own your job while you&#x27;re out and they will need to make changes as they see fit.<p>* Ask your boss or peer to do 1:1&#x27;s with the person stepping in your place<p>-----<p>On my team, this was pretty successful. It created an opportunity for me to step to the next level and someone else to follow in behind me. That situation won&#x27;t be true for all teams. However, startups are intended to grow. Grow your people now, so you&#x27;re ready when you really need them.

I don&#x27;t really agree with the other comments so far, as they minimize the impact that your leave will have on your remaining team members. &quot;They will self manage and someone else will step up.&quot; But the corollary there is that if your teams can handle just as well <i>without</i> you as <i>with</i> you, then the rational decision would be for your company to just fire you if you aren&#x27;t raising the output or success probabilities of your team.<p>First off, yes, I agree with the notion that you should take the leave, and that being with your children at this time is much more important than work. That said, here is how I&#x27;ve seen other folks handle it:<p>1. If possible, especially for paternity leave, I think it&#x27;s a good idea for both your team <i>and</i> your family if you can break up some of your time, e.g. take a month or two now, then come back to work for a month or two, then go back off for a month or two. Many folks have family that will help with the kids in the early days, so it was helpful to always have a extra pair of hands at home for the mom during the first half year or so.<p>2. Your team <i>will</i> feel the burden of extra work when you&#x27;re on leave, but I think it&#x27;s good just to recognize that and set things up as best as possible beforehand. Sometimes people get sick, or people leave for other reasons. Mat&#x2F;pat leave is just one more thing people and businesses need to learn to handle, and (and I say this as someone without kids), even a small team will have to learn to deal with these &quot;curve balls&quot; at one point or another. You shouldn&#x27;t feel guilty for taking your leave, just like one shouldn&#x27;t feel guilty for getting sick.

It&#x27;s just a company. Take your time and spend it with your family, and don&#x27;t stress about it. In a decade you&#x27;re not going to regret bonding with your spouse and child and missing some work.

I am doing this right now (paternity). I did what most of the comments suggested: asked someone to take on the essential parts of my role (CTO), and scaled back the non-essentials over the course of a few months.<p>It’s going extremely well. I think the person who took on my role is doing it better than I used to. A spring clean of responsibilities was helpful and forced us to document &#x2F; distribute a variety of things that used to fall on me for no good reason.<p>Feel free to email me if you want to discuss more.<p>And most importantly, congratulations! You’re going to love it. Whatever you do regarding work, structure it so you don’t have to think about it when you do 2am feeds (because you really won’t want to).

&gt; If you&#x27;re manager of a lean team or startup, how have you effectively handled your or an employee&#x27;s mat&#x2F;pat leave when in reality, your biz is already short-staffed? Temporary promotions? Contractors? Spreading the work across the team?<p>I usually make a replacement hire and ask the person returning from leave if they want to keep doing what they were doing (this is a legal obligation) and if the returnee says yes, I offer to move the replacement to a different role (if the replacement is redundant and productive). In a small startup, leaves are a great way to expand the team - you get a great person back, and have a no risk way to try out a new person. You just have to remember that people on leave... be it National Guard, maternity or any other contractual or legally mandated leave absolutely have to get their old job back, and excuses for not doing so will result in painful, often losing litigation.

If you are a manager taking leave then you need someone else to manage the team while you are out. Often there is nobody on the team who is really ready to manage it. Then you&#x27;ll need to get help from elsewhere; perhaps your manager can help out, or perhaps a manager elsewhere in the organization can assist.<p>It can be a tough situation because as a manager and a leader you have to take responsibility for what happens when you are on leave. Sometimes the replacement manager leads a mess and you are left responsible for it. Sometimes things will improve without you and company leadership won&#x27;t want you to resume your old job when you return.<p>Personally, and as a father, I was fortunate to work at a company which was very flexible about paternity leave. I really preferred taking a couple weeks off at the start, and then returning to work but just working 4 days a week for a while (and not very long hours). It was approximately the same amount of leave but just structured differently. I really advocate this (for men taking paternity leave, whose wife is going to take full time leave) if you can swing it.<p>There are two reasons. One is that it works out better at home. Honestly as a father with a young baby and a wife who is taking leave, your wife and child do not need you in the house 24&#x2F;7. A day a week to catch up on errands is great. Leaving work in time to make dinner is great. More than that, you just run out of useful stuff to do. And a six month old baby is really just about as much work as a three month old baby! Having five Fridays off to run errands with a six month old baby is more useful than using those same days of leave to take a whole week off with a three month old baby.<p>The second reason is that it works out better at work. If your manager is only working four days a week for a while and not working late, it&#x27;s basically fine, as long as you aren&#x27;t at some super intense startup. It isn&#x27;t disruptive to your team, you&#x27;re still available to help people, you&#x27;re still in touch with what&#x27;s happening at work.

Every one should be able to take leave and not kill your project at any time. If that&#x27;s not where you are now the project is at risk. Someone might change jobs just as much as mat&#x2F;pat leave. You should make sure that no one person knows how do perform any task that is needed.<p>Even&#x2F;especially soft skills like being &quot;leader for a day&quot;. Or being &quot;last word on xxx&quot; for a day. Or driving some change.<p>If you do that without fail the team is able to cover anyone else. Any team of 7 people has one 7th the extra workload when someone is absent, but nothing should stop working. When you are 7 again, if its the person with knowledge back, you are up to speed immediately; if it&#x27;s someone new, it takes time to get back to where you were.<p>If you work like: this when it&#x27;s your turn to be off, noone will miss you, or curse your absence, and they will be very pleased when you are back.<p>In short &quot;spread the work across the team&quot; and &quot;temporary promotions&quot; as everyday practices, before and after expected leave.<p>This approach pays off immediately, shorter absences such as plane delays, crisis at school or someone just being late to a meeting, are easier to deal with too.

Director-level here. Given enough notice (let&#x27;s say weeks, not days -- but hopefully you have months of notice!), I will figure something out. This is not your problem -- it&#x27;s my problem.<p>I always encourage people taking mat&#x2F;pat leave to take the entire time alotted by the company. It&#x27;s just a job. I can deal without you. If I can&#x27;t deal without you, then I haven&#x27;t been doing my job. As a leader of a lean organization, I am constantly thinking about the bus factor.<p>It&#x27;s not just mat&#x2F;pat leave, but what if you got COVID and were out for a week? What if you had an emergency health situation and had to be out for six weeks? What if you just straight up quit tomorrow? How would I handle that? Well, it turns out that&#x27;s the same way I would handle mat&#x2F;pat leave. If we&#x27;re down, we have to fill in the gap somehow. We&#x27;ll manage. We have to.<p>Maybe that means hiring contractors temporarily. I&#x27;ve done that. It&#x27;s a fine solution. But truth is that the only true thing to do is to work to make sure the workload is distributed across other people, deprioritize the least important things and put them in the backlog, and make sure that everyone is aware that any projects this person is responsible for will move slower until either this person returns or we can bring more resources to bear on the project. We can&#x27;t overload the rest of the team, but we also can&#x27;t operate at 100% capacity -- the business needs to realize that. And if they don&#x27;t, then that&#x27;s a Big Problem that has <i>nothing</i> to do with your paid family leave.<p>Right now there are currently 2-3 people in my org that are so critical that if something happened, we&#x27;d be totally boned. Fortunately, they are all healthy and happy and not expecting children at the moment, so it&#x27;s not an urgent emergency, but I am still spending a chunk of my time getting some cross-training in with other team members to make sure that the bus factor is at an acceptable level.<p>Long story short: it&#x27;s not <i>your</i> problem if your teams can&#x27;t handle your absence, it&#x27;s your <i>manager&#x27;s</i> problem. And if they can&#x27;t handle that... well, it&#x27;s just a job. There are other jobs out there. You can find one that treats you like a human being worthy of respect and time and energy.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t stress out too much about it, honestly.

In my experience, people who rush back don&#x27;t end up staying at the job very long. There is resentment created&#x2F;builds. Especially among the moms. There&#x27;s been a few studies on % who return to work...much higher after being allowed to take a clean break for a child&#x27;s birth.<p>Don&#x27;t rush it. It&#x27;s the 4 glass balls and 1 rubber ball rule. The only one that won&#x27;t break is the job.

My friend is the CEO of a small startup. Her husband is basically the COO. They didn&#x27;t really take mat&#x2F;pat leave. They pulled back on their work a bit, stopped doing 1 on 1&#x27;s for a while, and stopped traveling, but they were still both taking important meetings.<p>She did however have the benefit of both sets of grandparents being able to live with her during the first few months, so she had a lot of help.<p>So I guess the big tip here is, if you can get full time live in help take advantage of it?<p>Sorry if this isn&#x27;t super helpful, but just another data point for you.

Do you have a business continuity plan (for your team) that is part of the continuity plan for the overall business? If not, use this opportunity to create one. I am guessing based on my past experience that a fast moving startup may not have had time to fully plan an effective BCP (customer facting processes, technology, organization, people and process). So, doing this is generally valuable in the long run.<p>When you start thinking in these terms, you will be able to figure out obvious solutions that include rotating responsibilities amongst team members, how to handle inter-departmental expectations and agreements etc., Involve your team members as well so you get a full picture of all the risks and you can come up with mitigation plans (or at the least know the gaps so that you can go to your manager and have an intelligent discussion).<p>If you have enough time to plan this out, you can consider adding a couple of paid interns to the group to help your team members with the workload, freeing them up for taking on your tasks while you are away. Or if additional hiring is anyway planned for the future, you may be able to talk your management into advancing one or two hires sooner to help the business sail through this.<p>Most reasonable business managers will be able to look at things wholistically and help you find a solution that helps you and the business. There may also be resources from other departments that they may be able to borrow to help you, so don&#x27;t assume anything.<p>Enjoy your well-deserved timeoff with your family.

&gt; If you&#x27;re manager of a lean team or startup, how have you effectively handled your or an employee&#x27;s mat&#x2F;pat leave when in reality, your biz is already short-staffed? Temporary promotions? Contractors? Spreading the work across the team?<p>I took two months of paternity leave in my funded startup of 2 people. I told my colleague (an experienced guy but nonetheless my subordinate) to take a 2 month vacation and said nothing to anyone else. It was fine. My wife is in a profession with 65hr actual weeks and it was the maximum time she had.<p>The reality is that in places that are big enough to have subordinates &#x2F; tiers with enough autonomy, it doesn’t really matter.<p>Your work is going to seem so easy compared to the baby. Especially because you go from working like 10-20 real hours to 70.<p>That said, now is the time to find another job. Especially if you are going to start your leave before delivery. There is so much discrimination in workplaces against this “change of arrangement.” Every high powered intelligent new mom I know who came to their own conclusion to seek new work was delighted she did so.

I&#x27;ve done on parental leave twice as a founder. Each time was very different and it was dependent upon the size and stage of the company.<p>The first time was when the company has 8 employees, and I was handling all sales&#x2F;customer relationships. I took 2 days prior to my wife giving birth and then 4 days afterwards. The team was prepared and handled it well. I was then part-time for the next month or so. I did all nighttime feedings and then handed off our little girl to my parents at 7am (who come to our house during the day) and sleep until around 12 noon and then went to work on site until 5&#x2F;6pm. This was pre-pandemic of course.<p>The second time around the company has grown to 100 employees and we have raised a few rounds of financing and we have a well developed management team. This time I am taking 12 weeks fully off. It is quite nice to know that the company is now scalable. I am currently 3 weeks into the 12 weeks.

I took 5 weeks off from my startup when I had my first, and I’ll be taking 3 months off for my second who arrives end of the month. I’m at a larger organization now in a leadership role, and my past startup I was one of three.<p>As others are already writing, you should take some bonding time and adjustment time, regardless of company size. Those first few weeks are a huge adjustment, and you need to focus on your family, partner, and newborn, more than a company.<p>How long is appropriate then becomes a question of a number of factors. I don’t want to make a value judgment on anyone who feels like 2 weeks is enough vs someone who says 12 weeks is the minimum. Life is complicated and nobody knows your situation better than you. But, you should optimize first for your family, and then once that is finished, figure out what a return to work timeline looks like.<p>Parenthood is such a wild journey with its own unique set of challenges, struggles, and joys. My best to you and your partner.<p>Godspeed.

Im the CTO of a company that got funded, about the first time i became a parent. In the year since i have been promoted to CEO. Living in Sweden i have access to generous paternity leave, but taking it out would kill my company.<p>Some how im making it work and am pretty close to an equal parent. You learn tricks, like you best friend is a headset. Keyboard time is extremely valuable, so i try to use it for code, and use voice for a lot of communication. I love my job so if i can spend 8h working and 8h with my son life is good and i dont need more, if i can do both like taking a meeting when in the park things are stellar.<p>Dont get me wrong its hard, but loving what you do is the key to doing anything that is hard.

Generally, everyone should have clear goals - use OKR’s if you want for this.<p>If the goals are clear and time bound, then execution be straightforward enough. The trick is what to do if things don’t go according to plan.<p>I generally ask my team to do a little tabletop for the quarter on what “release valves” or alternate routes we have to accomplishing the goal.<p>Also - if you’re essential to the team executing, you’re already behind. Engineers aren’t fungible cogs, but part of a leader’s job is to teach team members how to do their job.<p>A resilient team can execute without all members because there’s shared goals and roles&#x2F;responsibilities.

The place I work now has a really wonderful policy: maternity&#x2F;paternity leave can be used in a part-time fashion. People who are recent parents frequently come in for a couple days a week, or a few hours a day -- as they think will work best as they try to balance two worlds.<p>Now, don&#x27;t get me wrong -- for a few weeks after birth, you&#x27;re injured and shouldn&#x27;t be working at all. <i>At all</i>. And for a few months after, you&#x27;re in an intensive time of bonding and sleep disruption, and outside demands should be kept to a minimum. I found that my time of maximum stress and exhaustion with my three babies occurred when the babies were 3-7 mo old. So be gentle to yourself; it&#x27;s a marathon. Minimize work commitments. I tell first time parents that all the stuff you <i>want</i> to do, that you want to get back to, that you feel like you lost... you can do it <i>next</i> year. Take a baby year. Nobody ever listens to me, but... ;)<p>Anyway. Don&#x27;t threaten any of <i>that</i> with part time work. But if you have a few hours of the day to give to the company, it lets you really get done the stuff only <i>you</i> can do, and gives you a break from baby baby baby all the time to boot. I have found that such an approach forces me to be efficient. Turns off I can hand off some tasks I thought I couldn&#x27;t, or can scale back some I didn&#x27;t think were scalable. In turn, I&#x27;m a lot more willing to come back to work a lot sooner if it&#x27;s not for a full day.

I cannot speak to how you live your life, but I find myself very invested in my job. This is in general a good thing (I think) as it provides me the mental state to try and do the best job that I can as working hard is easy. The question you have posed leads me to believe you may feel similarly.<p>That said, my two boys (5 months, 6 years) are the most important thing in my life (along with my wife of course). My second son is 5 months old now and I just took 3 months off to care for him. I wish I had more time, 2 years might be enough. When my first son was born I only took two weeks of vacation, which was not even close to enough. It is something I still regret.<p>While I do not like to give parenting advice, I can say with certainty, you should take as much time as you possibly can. Don&#x27;t think about work, don&#x27;t look at work, try not to worry about work, it will be there when you return. As a mother, spend time to recover physically. No matter how the child is born, the process is very physically taxing and your body will change a lot in the following weeks&#x2F;months. Make sure you are keeping an eye on your mental health, postpartum depression is not something to take lightly. Most important, try to relax (it is hard) and just love your child. The first months are wild.

If you&#x27;re a manager, and you&#x27;re not director or c-suite (i.e., you don&#x27;t control the budget), this isn&#x27;t your problem.<p>Go to <i>your</i> manager and present the situation, and see what they have available to you. Do <i>they</i> have budget for contractors, new hires, etc? Because, if they don&#x27;t, you don&#x27;t have any real options besides dumping the work on one or more people, or allowing deadlines to be pushed back.<p>They either have&#x2F;make headcount or they don&#x27;t.<p>If your business is already short staffed, the employees are already being exploited.<p>Let me repeat: Perpetual short staffing is exploitation. &quot;Running lean&quot; isn&#x27;t a real thing, it&#x27;s just a fancy way to say that the company is making compromises that an established business wouldn&#x27;t make. You either need staff or you don&#x27;t.<p>The business will miss deadlines and that&#x27;s fine. Unless you own the company, it&#x27;s not your problem.<p>Take your entire leave. Do not check email or Slack while you&#x27;re on leave. Take your entire leave. Do not check email or Slack while you&#x27;re on leave. Take your entire leave. Do not check email or Slack while you&#x27;re on leave.

CTO of a 4 person org.<p>Took 4.5 months of paternity leave, and 1 month of flex-time in December 2021.<p>Worked for us by knowing it was coming to plan ahead for in terms of breaking down knowledge silos, dry runs of delegating niche tasks, and documenting tasks I became owner of in tenure.<p>During paternity leave, I was fully disconnected. Upon my return, I had a team who grew during that time, and we&#x27;re more resilient as a result of my time away.

If you are an essential part of your startup as, for example CTOs are in very early stage startups, you may find it difficult to completely detach for more than a few weeks especially if the business is negotiating a complicated part of its development.<p>There is much good advice here but I would add a few things that I have not seen in other comments. My advice is not for people who are employees as I believe they should take at a minimum their entire statutory allowance, but for founders with a greater stake in the success of the business:<p>- although the first few weeks are certainly the most challenging especially if you end up staying on in hospital for a few days, there will be many challenges over the entire first year unless you have excellent family (ie grandmother) help - so pace yourself and your team&#x27;s expectation of your involvement.<p>- Plan to be completely absent for the first few weeks and adjust your team&#x27;s expectations accordingly, but then optimise asynchronous communication of all but the most pressing issues from that point on. This helps if your business is remote because it&#x27;s likely you will already be successfully using asynchronous communication through tickets &#x2F; slack &#x2F; email.<p>- While it would have been great to spend my downtime watching series, early infancy tends to give you a lot of time at unexpected hours and it can actually end up being quite painless to put in 2-3 hours of problem solving or pull request reviews. These can make the difference between a team heading radically off path and staying on track.<p>- If you can (ie if you&#x27;re not the one breastfeeding -- that&#x27;s totally consuming and you won&#x27;t be able to do anything) try and distribute some of your leave later because babies get more engaging every extra day they are out of the womb!<p>Good luck!

Few things that would help:<p>- Find the next best person&#x2F;team members who could shadow some of what you do, if not all. Work closely with them to pick up your stuff even before you leave<p>- Document all the complex stuff you do as much as possible. Never underestimate the power of documentation, even if not perfect. We maintain an internal Wiki and I am always pushing everyone to document whatever they can especially repeating processes. No matter how small.<p>- Start delegating already and do trial runs. For example, you run that monthly meeting ? Let the other person run it while you are still around and on the meetings.<p>- Set expectations early on that you will not be available and the rest of the team has to work accordingly.<p>Unfortunately, in lean teams, there is no easy way. But it is also true that nothing stops just because 1 person is not available even though it can be a bit difficult. Human beings are very good at adapting especially when they have no choice.<p>So do your best and enjoy your time off.

3-4 months leave is &quot;decent&quot;? I only get 6 weeks...

It depends on how long this leave takes. 6wks, 12wks, 6 months?<p>All your current work loads can be categorized into A)urgent -important; B) urgent - not-important; C) not urgent- important and though we thought for startups, there won&#x27;t be D) not-urgent and not-important, but there could be - if you question those tasks really hard lol.<p>I would recommend treat ABCD with different approaches. For A)Have the plan and directions, hand over to a current colleague you trust, or your manager. B) Hire an immediate contract for this, or ignore it for now. C) Have a thought and plan on this, have your stake on this, but depends on how long you are leaving - this could be the best re-entry task for your coming back! D) the key take away for D is really to identify those and then cross them.<p>Hope this helps.

I cofounded a company and had my first kid 4 months later - it was brutal. I took 2 weeks off completely but then had to take a bunch of days after because babies are hard work.<p>What I would do next time:<p>- Take more than 2 weeks (lol)<p>- Communicate expectations before and during<p>- Assign out your core responsibilities (start by looking at last months meetings and seeing who wouldve been best to replace you)<p>- Be available via Slack and E-mail when needed<p>- Put wife and baby first (this means slack&#x2F;emails only get tended to when baby is napping and your not cooking&#x2F;cleaning, etc.)

It&#x27;s a job. There are others. If your team is worth its salt its members will be supportive, excited, and will yearn for your return.<p>With regards to time off in general, writing shit down is my best advice. Get people used to searching some knowledge store before asking you. That way you won&#x27;t be missed when it comes to explaining to individuals what you&#x27;ve already told fifteen people in separate one on one conversations. You&#x27;re left to innovate.

Depends on the people. I promoted someone from my team, and when I came back it was much easier to pick up where I left off. I can imagine that that&#x27;s going to be more of a challenge when the company hires someone entirely new to do your job. Several ex colleagues who came back, started job hunting after a few weeks in, because their expectations changed and less intensive jobs at larger companies seemed better paced.

My experience is that there are no problem. The same oh so important bugs are there waiting for you in the bug tracker when you come back.

Take the leave.<p>It is already hard enough to adjust to parenthood. Use it or you will regret it in the future.<p>You should not be worrying about your teams. If you did your job right, they will self-manage and someone will step up to help call the shots while you&#x27;re out.<p>Take the hit to productivity of not having another person on the team for the duration of your leave. The world will go on without you.

I&#x27;ve done this and we have someone currently out on leave (both of us founders). We do 2 weeks of radio silence, 1 week working half time remote, 1 week of full time remote, then back in the office. The two weeks is tough but we&#x27;ve been able to spread the workload to other members of the team.

First, get the priorities straight:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ProgrammerHumor&#x2F;comments&#x2F;wwpzhh&#x2F;when_the_10x_dev_takes_a_break&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ProgrammerHumor&#x2F;comments&#x2F;wwpzhh&#x2F;whe...</a>

View it as an opportunity for your promising team members to step and develop. It will give them space to flourish. Sell it that way as a win-win. When you come back, you will hopefully have a stronger team and can build on it as you grow.<p>If you are short-staff try to hire ASAP.

Had a kid at startup. Not much paternity leave, about 2 weeks. I don’t know how new moms could do it. It is pretty intense. Knowing what I know now, I would have probably preferred a large co during this period.

That is way too short! Should be at least a year or two imho but I can see why more and more companies are covertly avoiding hiring women and why professional women avoid pregnancy. In some places, taking such leave could affect your career, so much that when women get married they opt to not have children or give up their careers altogether, leading to decline in birth rates (ex. Korea, Japan)<p>There should be more subsidies and tax incentives for companies to provide longer mat&#x2F;pat leave.

I’m originally from israel, and we have very generous maternity leave over there (no paternity as far as I know, moved to the US back in 2012).<p>i joined a startup in 2007 and we’ve had numerous pregnancies (one of our team leaders had 4 kids from 2007-2014), each followed by 6 months of maternity leave.<p>how did we handle it? people pick up the slack and it just works, it’s not even an option so you get by, end of story. it really is that simple.

Wife should quit the startup and raise the kid

Not quite connected to the main topic but Mat &amp; Pat (originally &#x27;Pat &amp; Mat&#x27;) [1] was the cult bedtime cartoon in the 70s and 80s in communist block countries. As the main (and only) two characters were great tinkerers I thought you might like it. Just to get a taste [2]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pat_%26_Mat" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pat_%26_Mat</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ZXbwF38gYB8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ZXbwF38gYB8</a>

Oh! I am just (next week) wrapping up leave! First - congratulations! My husband and I just had our first kiddo earlier this year and went through a similar &quot;what do we do&quot; sort of moment. We managed our time and workload by going to a &quot;one week on, one week off&quot; schedule, alternating between the two of us. Oh aside from all this - definitely pay money for Huckleberry (or an app like it). It will help you just manage your life. :-)<p>A lot of this is borrowed from Manager Tools &quot;How To Go On Vacation&quot; podcast. [1]<p>Here&#x27;s what worked and what didn&#x27;t for me:<p>What worked:<p>A. Name a clear &quot;number one.&quot; [2] In my case I named two since I have a tech leadership role. I called out one of our lead architects as my &quot;number one,&quot; and my peer director as an HR focal.<p>B. Make a list of everything on your plate, and your team&#x27;s plate. For each item, write down a small summary of it, and then figure out who owns it. Tell that person they now own that work item. If you don&#x27;t have a clear owner, the &quot;number one&quot; you chose becomes the owner.<p>C. I gave my team ~6 months (after we told family), a three month reminder, a one month reminder, and then &quot;it&#x27;s go time&quot; when our baby showed up three weeks early. :-)<p>D. I took the list of projects and made a company-wide (not public) shared read only doc that had &quot;if you&#x27;re looking for X, contact ___,&quot; and put at the top and bottom &quot;if you need anything that&#x27;s not on this list, talk to ___&quot; (your number one).<p>E. My husband and I both took off the first two weeks, then started the &quot;on&#x2F;off&quot; schedule. I set two different out-of-office notifications when I&#x27;m out. The <i>external</i> one said I was out for paternity leave, promised baby pictures, and had the two contacts (my number one and director). The <i>internal</i> one said the same as the external, but also had a link to the &quot;coverage doc&quot; that explained project-by-project who to reach out to. It also said in blunt instructions: &quot;No news is good news. Please make a decision without me. If you can&#x27;t, or need help, contact (number one). If you need air cover, contact (director). If we will do irreparable harm to the business or you have a business continuity or ethics concern, text me. I won&#x27;t be checking email or slack.&quot;<p>F. Turn off notifications &#x2F; uninstall email &#x2F; slack etc on your phone. Enjoy those first two weeks. :-)<p>G Book a &quot;catch up&quot; meeting ahead of time with your number one and any key contacts for when you return.<p>J. Book 1:1&#x27;s with key contacts for every week you return from leave. DEFINITELY DO THIS. YOU WILL BE OUT OF TOUCH. THIS IS A WAY TO LESSEN THE PROBLEM AND MAINTAIN RELATIONSHIPS.<p>Some warnings:<p>M. After a few weeks we &quot;got the hang of it,&quot; and caved on the &quot;I won&#x27;t check in&quot; rule and started lurking on slack. Once people figured it out they started slacking me, which started a feedback loop. Don&#x27;t start the feedback loop.<p>N. A few times I tried to work a day on my &quot;off&quot; weeks because it felt like &quot;I got this!&quot; or something urgent came up. It wasn&#x27;t a good use of time or a good idea. I was out of sync with the team, and about 1&#x2F;3 of the time behind b&#x2F;c I hadn&#x27;t scrolled through -all- of the slack channels to see that issue X had already been addressed.<p>O. You&#x27;re pushing work down. That means that folks are going to have to push work off of their plates themselves. They should not turn around and delegate something you are delegating to them. You should expect them to take a task from you, and then stop doing one or more other tasks by either delegating those &quot;smaller&quot; things to someone else, or dropping them to the floor (&quot;Mike&#x27;s on paternity leave, I&#x27;m covering for him, sorry I can&#x27;t do your TPS report&quot; is a fair answer). Emphasize that delegation model.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.manager-tools.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;05&#x2F;how-go-vacation-part-1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.manager-tools.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;05&#x2F;how-go-vacation-part-1</a><p>[2] You should have a lieutenant &#x2F; number one anyway just for succession planning &#x2F; hit-by-a-bus reasons.