Almost every lab has a folder nobody opens. It belonged to someone good, the work in it was real, and now nobody is quite sure what's finished, what's abandoned, or which version of the analysis produced the figure that's already in a paper.
This happens because handover is usually treated as an admin task in the final week, when it is actually a documentation task that should start about a month out. What follows is the version that works — not the exhaustive version, the one people actually complete.
A PhD student or postdoc finishing up, a lab manager organising a handover, or a PI who has just realised someone leaves in five weeks. It assumes nothing about what software you use, and most of it works on paper.
Start four weeks out, not four days
The single biggest predictor of a good handover is when it starts. In the last week the person leaving is finishing a thesis, moving flat, and interviewing. Anything you ask for then will be thin.
Four weeks gives you time to do the one thing that matters most — have them narrate their own work while they still remember it. Not write it up formally. Narrate it, badly, into whatever's easiest.
The three things that always get lost
Across most handovers the same three gaps appear. Everything else can usually be reconstructed; these can't.
1. Why an experiment was abandoned
Half-finished work with no note attached is the most expensive thing in the folder, because the next person will repeat it. A single line — "stopped this, the antibody batch was bad" — saves someone three months.
2. Which original file produced which figure
This is the one that surfaces years later, usually when a reviewer or a co-author asks. If the figure lives in a slide deck and the data lives in a folder named by date, the connection exists only in one person's memory — and that person has left.
3. The undocumented deviation
The protocol says 30 minutes; they always did 45 because it worked better. It's in nobody's notes. It's the reason the next person can't reproduce it.
woodle.cloud exists because of the second one. It keeps a result attached to the run and the original file behind it, so a handover doesn't depend on anyone remembering. The checklist below works whatever you use — including paper.
See how it works →The handover checklist
Work down it. Tick as you go — this list remembers your progress while the page is open.
What good looks like
A successful handover isn't a complete archive. It's a state where the person inheriting the work can start something without needing to contact the person who left.
That's the test. If the answer is "I'd have to email them," the handover isn't finished — and the window in which they'll reply gets narrower every month.
If you're the one leaving
Two selfish reasons to do this properly. Your work gets cited and continued rather than quietly repeated. And when someone asks you about it in three years — in an interview, or from a journal — you'll be able to answer without opening a single folder.
This checklist is free to copy, print, or paste into your lab's own documentation. No attribution needed and no signup — if it's useful, use it.