Do you have a contingency plan in place?

Dmitry

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Hey guys! Not so long ago I had a family emergency and it sort of made me unavailable for the good portion of the day to reply to any emails or calls. Which got me thinking: do freelancers need to have a contingency plan in place?

Do you have any kind of system in place in case there's an emergency or an accident and you need to quickly notify your clients? Would love to hear your thoughts and opinions!

March_ts

Dmitry I don't and I've just realized! The best I could do would be trying to reply to as many emails as I could saying that I'm not available.
I guess that activating an OOO automatic email would also work, wouldn't it?
However, if it was a serious emergency and I were unavailable to reply, I wouldn't know what else to do. Simply leaving the emails unanswered, I guess...?

eleonorang

I don't have any contingency plan, but I think the first thing I'd do is set automatic OoO replies where I assure clients I will look into their requests asap. For longer time periods the best thing to do would try and ask trusted colleagues to take over your work, just as we were discussing in the OoO replies topic here on the forum.

In case you don't get to set OoO replies either... well, imho it's wrong to ask people to be reachable and active no matter what, even in 2017, so I guess they'll have to deal with our absence for a while ?