Refusing to Document

Have you ever approached something thinking it had to be done a “certain” way??

Yep, me too.?

As part of my corporate hangover (in addition to refusing to plan), I had built a habit of thinking things had to be done a specific way, and that I was the only one who could do them.?

This led to being stuck doing everything myself, especially because there wasn’t an easy or reliable way to delegate what I was doing.?

Spoiler alert: there was. I just didn’t do it. Which brings us to Lesson #9: Refusing to document.?

It seems that one of the biggest “course correcting” items I've encountered in my 10 years in business is my resistance to documentation. That is, documenting how we do things.

Ultimately, I can trace this resistance back to an experience I had when I was working in corporate.?

Let me set the stage: I worked for a company that manufactured products, and we had a document control team.?Then through a series of changes in the company, I ended up managing the document control team.?

But this was so against my nature. The bill of materials, and the versioning, and the tedium of having to have all these things and all this documentation was just abhorrent to me.?

It was probably actually traumatic for me because I didn't want anything to do with it. It was so the opposite of my characteristics and what I valued.

So cut to Brandy, the business owner, who now wouldn't write anything down.

I refused to create documentation. No way was I creating a whole “how to do this” or “how to do that” document with screenshots and painstaking instructions.??

What changed my mind on this was launching a website for about the fourth time and screwing up the order of operations. I finally thought, “you know what? I could really use a checklist. Checklists are good. Checklists are useful. They're easy. They don't seem onerous or tedious. Okay, a checklist.”?

So I started with a checklist.?

And then it dawned on me that a checklist was actually documentation. I know, it seems obvious but I was very committed to my position. A checklist could be used not only by me to correctly launch websites and not cause myself ulcers, but it could be used by someone who was not me.?

That was my first breakthrough in documentation. But if I’m honest, my stubbornness still kept me stuck. It was a while before I figured out what documentation might look like for me on a bigger scale and could really embrace it.?

Then I had my second aha moment. This was when screencasting tools, like Loom or Soapbox, became available and got good enough that I could just click a button, talk to my screen, and send somebody a link to that recording showing them how things were done.

That changed everything. I went from refusing to document anything to embracing it, because with just a bit of extra effort, talking through what I was doing, instead of just doing it, I might never have to do that thing again. Or it could be done reliably with a predictable outcome by someone else.?

I mean, imagine this: launching websites could be done in a matter of 10 minutes instead of an hour and a half like they used to when you screwed up the order of things because you didn’t have simple documentation. Mind blown!

And now, we have documentation all over the place. When someone is out, when we bring on a new team member, when we try something new - it all gets documented.?

It turns out documentation can be as simple as filming your screen - I was just too hungover from corporate to see how easy (and in line with who I am) it could be.?

Eek documentation, right? I know this wasn’t the sexiest failure and lesson, but it’s been a big one - is documentation something you struggle with??