Working alone: a daily check-in plan that doesn't depend on one person remembering.

Last reviewed: 18 July 2026

If you work alone — on a rural property, in a workshop after hours, on solo call-outs — or you live alone and the nearest person is a paddock away, you already know the maths: if something goes wrong, nobody notices until somebody misses you. Most people solve this with "I'll text the missus when I knock off". That works right up until the day she's on a plane, your phone is flat, or neither of you can remember whether last night's silence meant anything. This page walks you through building a check-in plan that survives all of that — one you'd actually keep following in month six. (If you first want the mechanism itself explained — what a check-in service and dead-man's-switch actually are — start with the plain guide.)

Put the check-ins where the risk is

A daily 9am "all good" text feels responsible but protects almost nothing. If the chainsaw work happens at 2pm, a missed morning check-in means help starts looking eighteen hours late.

Map your actual risk instead. Ask: at what moments today could something happen with nobody around? Then anchor check-ins to those moments:

• Before and after the hazardous task. "Starting on the windmill, give me until 3.30" beats any fixed-time check-in ever invented. The before-message also tells your contact where to look.
• End of the working day, when the solo work is general rather than one nasty job.
• A morning check-in earns its place mainly for people living alone, where the risk is a fall or medical event overnight — it proves you got up.
• Arrival after travel, if getting there involves remote roads or no phone coverage on the way.

Two or three well-placed check-ins beat six token ones. Every check-in you add is one more thing to forget, and a plan that cries wolf gets ignored — by you and by your contacts.

Decide now what a missed check-in triggers

The plan's whole value lives in this part, and it's the part most informal arrangements never define. "I'll worry if I don't hear from you" is not a trigger — worry has no next step. Write the escalation as a sequence with times attached:

• 1. Grace period. Life happens; a check-in ten minutes late is usually a stuck gate, not an emergency. Give each check-in a sensible window — say fifteen to thirty minutes — and shorten it for the genuinely dangerous tasks.
• 2. Contact attempt. Window expires, your contact calls you. Then texts. Then tries your second number if you have one (a UHF, a landline, a workmate on site nearby).
• 3. Second contact. No answer — they ring the backup person, who may know something ("he told me the job ran long") or may join the response.
• 4. Welfare check. Still nothing: someone goes and looks, starting from your last known location — which is why the "starting on the windmill" message matters. If there's real reason to fear injury and nobody can get there quickly, that's a 000 call, and the caller should be able to say exactly where you were working and what you were doing.

Write the sequence down with the actual names, numbers and time windows. Everyone in it should know which step is theirs and what triggers it — during an incident, nobody is making these decisions fresh.

Why one person isn't a system

The single-contact arrangement — spouse, mate, mum — is the standard plan, and it has three standard failures.

Availability. One person has holidays, hospital stays, flights, dead phones and nights out. Every one of those becomes a hole in your safety cover, usually unnoticed.

Drift. After three hundred quiet evenings, the nightly text stops feeling like safety equipment and starts feeling like a chore. It slips to "most nights". Missed ones stop registering.

Awkwardness. Escalating feels dramatic. Nobody wants to ring your brother at 9pm over a text, or be the person who sent a welfare check to a bloke who'd fallen asleep in front of the cricket. So people wait. Waiting is precisely the failure the plan exists to prevent.

Two fixes work. A roster — two or three people who know the plan, with a named person covering each day, so absence is handled by handover instead of by gap. Or an automated check-in service, where you check in against a schedule and the escalation runs automatically when you don't: no one person to be on holiday, no drift, and no awkwardness, because chasing a missed check-in is the system's job rather than a social decision. Plenty of solo workers run both — automation as the backbone, humans as the response.

Keep the details current, or the plan responds to the wrong place

An escalation is only as good as the information it hands the responder. A welfare check sent to your old address is worse than useless. Keep a short, dated info sheet with whoever (or whatever service) runs your escalation:

• Current address, and how to actually get in: gate codes, which turnoff, where the spare key lives, whether the dog is friendly.
• Site hazards someone should know before walking in — chemicals, machinery that might still be running, the dam, the bull.
• Vehicle description and the areas you usually work, for the day the search starts wider than the shed.
• Medical basics a responder would want.

Review it whenever something changes and skim it every few months regardless. Thirty seconds of upkeep is the difference between "he's at the new place on Reserve Road, gate code 4471" and a contact guessing.

Design it together, or watch it get skipped

A check-in plan imposed on someone — by a worried family or a well-meaning boss — gets resented, then quietly dropped. The person being checked on knows their real risk moments better than anyone, and a plan they helped set feels like their own safety system rather than surveillance. Sit down together. Let them pick the check-in times, the grace windows, the contacts, the wording. Agree what happens after a false alarm too: nothing. A welfare check on someone asleep on the couch is the system working, never something to apologise for — the first time someone gets grief over a false alarm is the last time the plan gets followed honestly.

The short version: Anchor check-ins to your actual risk moments — the start and end of dangerous tasks, not an arbitrary 9am. Define exactly what a missed check-in triggers: a grace window, a call, a second contact, then a welfare check, with names and times written down. Don't hang it all on one person; use a roster or an automated service so holidays and awkwardness can't hollow it out. Keep the address, access and hazard details current, and build the plan with the person it protects. If there's genuine reason to fear someone is hurt, call 000.

General guidance for individuals and small operations — workplace lone-worker obligations vary by state and industry, and any emergency is a 000 call. If you're covering employees rather than yourself, the lone workers page covers the business side.

Where this comes from

The official sources behind the above, so you can check any of it yourself rather than take our word for it:

• Safe Work Australia: hazards, the hazards hub that covers remote and isolated work.
• Safe Work Australia, the national body that develops the model work health and safety laws.
• SafeWork NSW, the work health and safety regulator for New South Wales.

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