Before I went on holiday (I’ve actually managed to go on two… showoff), I did something incredibly boring.

I wrote myself a handover.

These handover notes include stuff like:

  • What I was working on.
  • Why we’d made certain decisions.
  • Who I needed to speak to.
  • What needed doing next, and what needs doing on my first day back.

All included enough detail that someone with absolutely no memory of the previous few weeks could follow.

Which, after 10 days away driving a £900 Renault Laguna across Europe, turned out to be exactly who I was.

Coming back from proper time off is difficult when you’re working across multiple teams. There’s context everywhere, decisions you’ve forgotten making, and approximately 748 Slack messages waiting to convince you something super terrible happened while you were gone.

These notes mean that within a couple of days, I was back on it, handing work over to developers and moving on to the next piece of work toward delivery.

So treat this as a reminder that one of the less sexy things I’ve learnt as I’ve become more senior is to make life easier for future me:

Write things down.

A lot.

Decisions, assumptions, things I need to challenge, questions I still have, why something looks the way it does. Write that stuff down, and include outputs needed.

It’s not exciting design work.

But it means I don’t have to keep the entire project in my head.

And occasionally, when future Mikey comes back from holiday with very little idea of what past Mikey was doing, he has some idea what the heck happened before the sun tan.

Plus he’s always extremely grateful.