The Day Your Housekeeper Doesn't Show Up

Pick a day, any day, and imagine your housekeeper doesn't show up. Not resigned, just out sick or stuck at the airport, unreachable for the day. Walk through what actually happens, hour by hour, and be honest about it.

Does anyone else in the house know which school uniform goes with which day. Does anyone know that the toddler naps at a specific time and gets impossible if that window is missed. Does anyone know that the dog's evening walk has to happen before six or he'll bark at the neighbors. Does anyone know where the spare keys are, which is a smaller question with a surprisingly large number of wrong answers in most households.

Most admins, walking through this exercise honestly, find the answer is somewhere between "a few of these things" and "none of these things." Not because the household is disorganized. Because the knowledge was never supposed to live anywhere except in one person's head, and it's done exactly that, quietly, for months or years.

This isn't a hypothetical. Staff get sick. Staff take emergency leave to go home. Staff, eventually, leave for good, usually with less notice than anyone would like. The households that handle these days calmly aren't the ones with the most staff, or the best-paid staff. They're the ones where the day-to-day knowledge of the house was written down somewhere other than one person's memory, before it was ever needed.

Try the exercise honestly, in writing if you can. It usually takes ten minutes, and it's the fastest way to find out where your household actually has a gap, instead of finding out on the day it costs you.