Writing Down How You Do Things

Why it never gets written

Not laziness. The person who knows how to do something does not experience it as knowledge, they experience it as obvious.

So it does not occur to them that it needs recording, and if it does, writing it down feels like documenting the act of walking.

Meanwhile everybody else in the business either interrupts that person or guesses, and when they are unavailable the guessing gets worse.

The gap only becomes visible when somebody is ill, on holiday, or leaves, which is the worst moment to discover it.

What is worth writing

• Things done rarely, where nobody remembers the steps.
• Things only one person can do.
• Things that go wrong when somebody else attempts them.
• Anything with a deadline attached.
• Anything a customer would notice if it were skipped.
• The recovery procedures for when something breaks.

The first is the highest-value category and the least obvious one. A quarterly task nobody has done since March is functionally undocumented even for the person who did it.

Write it while doing it

The method, and it is the entire difference between useful and useless documentation.

Documenting from memory produces a version with the awkward parts missing, because those are the parts the expert has automated and no longer notices.

Writing while performing the task captures the actual sequence: where you have to wait, which login is needed, what the confusing screen looks like, and the step everybody gets wrong.

Keep a document open and add a line per action as you go, then tidy it for ten minutes afterwards.

It adds almost nothing to a task you were doing anyway, and it is the only version that somebody else can follow.

One page each

The constraint that keeps this alive.

A comprehensive manual is a project that gets started and abandoned, and it is unreadable even when finished.

One page per task, in numbered steps, is a document somebody will actually open when they need it.

If a procedure does not fit on a page, it is probably several procedures, and splitting it makes each more useful.

Write for somebody competent who has not done this before, which is a different reader from either a novice or an expert.

A worked example

A business had one person who handled everything to do with the website, the listing, invoicing setup, and two supplier systems.

When she was away for three weeks, four separate things could not be done, and one of them mattered.

Rather than attempting to document everything, she wrote one page each time she next performed one of those tasks, over about two months.

Seven pages resulted, each written during the task and tidied afterwards, totalling maybe three hours of extra effort spread across weeks.

The following time she was away, a colleague completed five of the seven without contacting her.

The two that failed produced better documentation, because the failure showed exactly which steps had been assumed.

Test it by giving it away

The step that turns a document into a procedure.

Hand it to somebody who has not done the task and watch them attempt it, without helping.

Every question they ask is a missing step, and every hesitation is an ambiguous one.

That is uncomfortable to watch and it is the only reliable test, because the author cannot see their own assumptions.

Twenty minutes of that produces a better document than an hour of careful writing, and it also trains somebody, which was half the point.

Where to keep them

A practical point, since documents that cannot be found are the same as documents that do not exist.

One place, owned by the business rather than by an individual, that more than one person can reach.

Named clearly by task rather than by system, since somebody looking will search for what they are trying to do.

Anything needed during an outage should also exist outside the systems it describes, which usually means a copy on paper or somewhere entirely separate.

And dated, so a reader can tell whether it predates a change they know about.

Start with the bus test

The prioritising question, put plainly rather than dramatically.

If any one person were unavailable for a month, what would stop.

Ask it about each person including yourself, and write down whatever comes up.

That list is short, specific, and usually surprising in that it contains a few small things nobody had noticed depended on one person.

Document those first, and ignore everything else until they are done.

Most businesses find between four and eight items, which is a manageable amount of writing spread over a couple of months.

Record it rather than writing it

An alternative worth knowing, because writing is the part people avoid.

Talking through a task while recording your screen, or narrating it into a phone, takes the length of the task and no longer.

The result is less searchable than a written page and considerably better than the document that never got written.

It also captures the small explanations a written version omits, since people say more than they write.

Where somebody later needs a written version, transcribing a recording is a straightforward job that anybody can do, which is a better position than starting from nothing.

The counter-case

Documentation has a real cost and can be overdone badly.

A sole trader with no staff and no succession plan gains little from writing procedures for themselves, beyond the few things that would matter to whoever picked up the pieces.

Documents also go stale, and a wrong procedure is worse than none because somebody will follow it. Anything written has to be revisited when the underlying thing changes, which is an ongoing cost.

And there is a version of this that becomes an alternative to doing the work, where a business documents extensively and improves nothing.

Write the handful that would stop the business, keep them to a page, and let everything else stay in people's heads where it is cheaper.

The exercise

1. Ask what stops if each person is away a month.
2. List four to eight items, no more.
3. Write each one while next performing it.
4. Keep it to a page, numbered.
5. Have somebody else attempt it unaided.
6. Store them where two people can find them.
7. Date each one and revisit when things change.

Step three is what makes this achievable, since it converts a project into a habit attached to work you were doing anyway.

Answering the same question repeatedly is covered in the question you answer on every phone call.

Frequently asked questions

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