You’ve already crossed so many hurdles: you’ve made the biggest commitment of your life. You have a child on the way. You’ve told your boss(es) and figured out your leave policy. If you’re pregnant, you’re dealing with raging hormones and all the bodily joys that come along for the ride. You’re getting up every day and doing your job. 

You are amazing. And you’re not done yet 😅

It’s time to make your maternity leave plan! 

If you’re a team of one (like me 👋) it’s especially important to get all your ducks in a row. Not just for your company, but for your own peace of mind. Life is about to get that much crazier: don’t let any lingering work worries add to your stress.

Hopefully, you use Strety at your job, so you can more easily organize what turns out to be a giant work project. But even if you don’t use Strety (yet!), you could still do the steps outlined in this blog with whatever you do use for your project planning/task management/team communication/playbooks, it just won’t be as cool (no offense).

Let’s go on a maternity leave planning journey so you can have as much peace of mind as is possible with a brand new baby! 

Make a rough list of what you do.

This will be hard and you will keep coming back to it. Just start, even if it feels silly to list it all out.

Some things will be easier than others. Any recurring weekly or monthly tasks you have are gimmes. Any big projects you’re working on should go on this list too, so you can evaluate how your maternity leave will impact them (i.e. will you be able to finish in time, if not, then what?).

What may be harder is the stuff you don’t normally keep documented. As Strety’s only marketing person, there’s a lot of stuff I do daily that I don’t really keep in my project/task management, like checking marketing metrics to see if I should adjust anything or interacting with people from our social media accounts. As you work, add things like this to your list of what you do. 

Don’t worry too much about examining the items on this list yet — that’ll come later. Just focus on getting everything documented as much as possible.

Make a list of the tools you use/logins you need to do your job.

This list should be much easier because it is super concrete: your tools and logins. You should also add to this list the other people who have access to these tools and at what level; that way you’ll know if you need to add access or seats if the tools will be used in your absence.

You’ll use individual tool information on different Playbooks, but I also had a master Playbook with all the tools and logins as well, so the info was in one place for anyone who needed it. This is your first and easiest Playbook to create!

Categorize your “work I do” list two ways.

Now is the time to examine the stuff on your “work I do” list — how impactful is it? How critical is it to the daily operation of your department? Is it something you can hand off to someone else?

There are 2 categories I suggest filtering your tasks into, each with 2 subcategories:

1. How important is it?

• Essential 
• Nice to have

2. How time-bound is it?

• Can be scheduled
• Must be done live

Here’s how you can visualize this matrix:

Make your how-to Playbooks.

If something is both “Essential” and “Must be done live,” you’ll need to come up with a foolproof plan for getting it done while you’re out. Not that your coworkers are fools, but… just make the plan foolproof anyway 😁 

These are your how-to Playbooks, where you document exactly how you would get the job done, do all the work you can possibly do ahead of time, and make it super-duper easy for a colleague to pick up the baton. 

For example, I knew that our official licensing agreement with EOS® was going to come through while I was out. This was a huge deal for us as a company and obviously something we wanted to be proactively marketing. 

I set up ads and content that reflected our new status as an officially licensed EOS® software. I didn’t know exactly when the agreement would come through, so I couldn’t schedule them to go live; instead I made a Playbook describing everything that was set up, how to edit it if necessary, and how to turn it on such that it would be a less-than 5 minute task for someone on my team to pick up. 

The folder for EOS Licensing Marketing Playbooks had how-to Playbooks for our most important channels, as well as resource Playbooks for info about the agreement and term usage. Each Playbook included so many links: to my Playbook on logins, general how-to Playbooks on our various content and ad channels, as well as links to a Rock around EOS®-focused marketing that had attached Milestones and To Dos for the team to stay organized. 

This was a BEAST of a Playbook folder that kept sprouting little spin-off linked Playbooks, but in the end everything went super smoothly! Plus, I had the added bonus of awesome documentation on many marketing processes that hadn’t been documented before.

Anything that falls under “Nice to have” and “Must be done live” is your lowest priority in terms of covering in Playbooks/worrying about covering for your maternity leave. If you think someone will want to do something in this category while you’re out, you can create a quick how-to Playbook for these tasks as well.

For example, while I was out, no one owned our social media. This meant the “nice to have/must be done live” task of reacting to people on LinkedIn from the Strety account would not be covered. I created a quick social media how-to Playbook that was super simple: info about who has access to our page, where to find notifications about related activity, and tips on posting. I doubt anyone looked at this Playbook while I was out because it was non-essential, but it was nice to have it!

Since our business operating system is super important to us, I also created a how-to Playbook for updating the marketing Scorecard in Strety while I was out. This ensured that nothing veered wildly off-track while I was gone, or at least couldn’t veer too far!

Make your summary Playbooks.

Your tasks that are “Essential” and “Can be scheduled” probably don’t require super detailed Playbook documentation but fit more in what I’d call a summary Playbook. Stuff that’s “Nice to have” and “Can be scheduled” is also a good candidate for you to schedule out and create a summary Playbook for, but should be lower on your list to cover. 

Summary Playbooks should include information about how your scheduled work impacts anything else going on and how to unschedule/adjust the scheduled stuff if needed. I made summary Playbooks for all of our major marketing channels.

For example, I set up blog posts to publish every Wednesday while I was out. This was obviously a big project for me to finish before I went on leave (so many blogs!) but the Playbook was super simple — it just described the tools/logins, posting schedule, and linked out to a how-to Playbook that describes the process for creating and publishing a single blog post.

Pro tip: when scheduling out work, try your best to create and schedule PAST your return to work. Having blogs already scheduled for the first few weeks of my return took a big thing off my plate so things felt a bit less frantic.

Create resource Playbooks.

One part of my job is making sales enablement materials for our awesome sales team. These are usually PDFs that dive deeper into specific topics our potential customers want to know more about.

Instead of having random links or folders in random places for them, I created a folder in my Marketing Playbooks for them, and uploaded each PDF as its own Playbook so they had them to hand in an easy place to find. 

When in doubt, make a Playbook!

There’s a lot you can’t predict about what will happen at your company while you’re on maternity leave. But there is some stuff that has enough likelihood to it that you should consider making a Playbook around it, even if it’s not explicitly scheduled.

For example, the Strety team loves integrations and has a rapid development cycle (not-so-humblebrag 😉). While there weren’t any integrations on the near-horizon that I didn’t already have covered, I knew there was a distinct possibility that the team would add another integration while I was gone. 

So I made a Playbook for the marketing tasks for new integrations, including where and how to update the website and links to templates for images. The team (successfully!) used this Playbook to add an integration while I was out — without ANY intervention from me. I was so proud 🥹

Assign the playbooks to the relevant people.

I assigned all of the critical leave Playbooks to the people who would have to cover those tasks. When you assign someone a Playbook in Strety, it automatically creates a To Do for them. I got notified when they marked those Playbooks as read, so I didn’t have to hound anyone about whether they knew what was going on. 

My coworkers were able to comment on the Playbook directly if they needed any clarification, leaving a threaded discussion that was always there for them if they needed reminders. Overall, it’s a smooth, easy, and organized way to communicate with your team about the work that needs to get done 😎

Connect your Playbooks to other BOS tools

I loved making these Playbooks in Strety. It was easy to make them super-comprehensive and foolproof by using images, videos, and links to other Playbooks, Rocks, Messages, and To Dos — all in one platform.

Strety’s Playbook functionality has gotten even better since my leave (remember what I said about a rapid development cycle?!). In addition to PDF uploads, you can create a Playbook via connections to Google Drive, One Note, Sharepoint, Dropbox, and more. This means that you don’t need to duplicate efforts if you have any necessary info somewhere else: you can just link it up in Strety.

I made myself Strety To Dos and Rocks around the tasks and projects I needed to complete before maternity leave, as well. I’ve been doing all my project management in Strety for the past year, again even before the massive project management improvements our team keeps shipping. (You better believe I’ll have a post waxing poetic about Projects in Strety soon!)

Prepping for maternity leave was a big project but being able to do it all in one place made it soooo much easier than it would have been otherwise! If you want to give it a shot, start a free trial or book time with someone on our team to see if Strety could be a good fit for you and your team.

Finally, LOG OFF FOR YOUR LEAVE!!!

It felt awesome to have everything I needed for maternity leave in one place, ready to go. At least in terms of work… getting my house ready was another story since my husband is anti implementing a family operating system 😂 C’est la vie!

There is joy in making beautiful Playbooks, and relief! You can log off for your leave without lingering worries! Everything will be FINE while you’re gone! 

SO LOG OFF and enjoy your time, as crazy as it will surely be: there’s no Playbook for babies…yet!