The Two-Week Window

The moment you learn a staff member is leaving, usually with somewhere between two weeks and a month of notice, is the single highest-leverage window in running a household with staff. Most of it gets wasted on shock, scheduling interviews, and hoping the departing person will "just show the new one around" on their last day, which almost never works as well as it sounds.

Here's a more useful use of that window.

• In the first two days, write down what that person actually does. Not their job title, their real week. Which days, which tasks, in what order, and which of those tasks have small judgment calls attached that aren't obvious from the outside. The school pickup that sometimes needs a five-minute buffer. The grocery order that always skips one brand the family doesn't like.
• In the first week, ask the departing staff member directly what they'd tell their replacement if they could only say five things. Not the manual version, the real version. This is often the single most useful conversation of the whole handover, and it's the one most households skip because it feels awkward to ask.
• In the second week, if there's any overlap at all, even a single day, use it for the departing person to introduce the new one to the household's actual rhythm, not just a tour of where things are kept. A day watching the real routine happen is worth more than a week of written instructions.
• Throughout, resist the urge to just wait and see how the new person figures it out. They will figure it out. It will take two to three months longer than it needed to, and there will be real mistakes along the way that were entirely avoidable.

The households that handle this window well aren't the ones with more time. They're the ones who treat the departing staff member's knowledge as something worth actively extracting, on purpose, before it walks out the door with them. That's also the exact moment a household knowledge base earns its keep. Not on a calm Tuesday. On the two-week countdown, when everything that person quietly knew becomes something the next person has to learn the hard way, unless it's already written down somewhere real.