The test your instructions have to pass
Good sitting instructions pass a simple test: someone entirely new to your animals could run a normal day from the sheet alone, and would recognise an abnormal day in time to act. Small pets need more detail than cats or dogs, not less, because their care is a chain of small, exact things — the right measured feed, hay that must never run out, a water bottle checked in a particular way — and because small prey animals hide illness until it is advanced, so the sitter's eyes are your early-warning system. Vague notes like feed twice daily, clean as needed transfer all your knowledge gaps straight to the person least able to fill them.
Write per pet, not per enclosure, wherever animals differ. Two guinea pigs may share a home and still have different foods, different confidence with handling, and different normal behaviour.
Food, water, and where everything lives
Name each food exactly as it appears on its packaging in your house, give the measured amount in the scoop, handful, or bowl the sitter will actually use, and state the times as windows that fit the animals' existing rhythm. Say where each item is stored — which cupboard, which bag, which shelf of the refrigerator for vegetables — and which approved fresh foods the sitter can offer, because a kind sitter improvising from their own kitchen can offer something unsuitable in complete innocence. Cover hay and water as routines, not afterthoughts: how often to top up hay, how to check a bottle is flowing by touching the ball at the spout, and what to do if a bowl is fouled.
Add the prohibitions. No extra treats beyond what you have left out, no picking up the nervous animal, no opening the enclosure during a dog's visit — whatever your household's real rules are, they belong on the sheet, not in your head.
Normal, abnormal, and who to call
Describe each animal's normal in a sentence or two the sitter can compare against: who rushes out for food, who always hides from strangers and should not be worried about, who is elderly and slow in the mornings. Then list the signs that change the day — an animal not eating, hunched and quiet, producing no droppings, breathing audibly, or injured in any way — and be explicit that these mean contact you the same hour, not at the end of the stay. Put your number, a backup person's number, and the veterinarian's number and address on the sheet itself, and say plainly that the sitter should take an ill animal in and that you will cover the cost; hesitation over money is a delay you can remove in advance.
The walkthrough and where the sheet lives
If distance allows, have the sitter do one full round with you watching before you travel: feeds measured by their hands, the enclosure opened and secured by them, the shy animal located in its hide without being dragged out. Ten supervised minutes expose every ambiguity in your written sheet while you are still there to fix it. Then leave the final sheet physically at the enclosure, printed, where a sitter with flat phone battery and an animal to feed can still read it.
Revise the sheet after every trip. The sitter's questions are a free audit of everything your instructions failed to say.
The handover is completed by KinsLe's Care Pass, whose temporary link opens scoped access for the sitter for a set period only.