Your Dynamic Documentation Cheat Sheet

Looking for a quick way to improve your documentation? Looking to jump into solving your documentation problem? Use this Dynamic Documentation Cheat Sheet for the most immediate impact on your work and the problem you are solving, and any new problems too. You have my guarantee.

• Document to drive action or change behaviours: Documentation is not a shelf exercise. It is about driving meaningful action. It should always be built with that intention in mind. Document a process so you can train your people. Document meeting notes so that you can take action. Document a policy to change people’s behaviours.
• Start with the why. Documentation is done for a purpose. Don’t lose sight of this in your corporate world. Make sure that your documentation has a purpose and that the why makes sense to you.
• Understand Information, Process, and People and how documentation connects them. Documentation brings together information, process, and people. It is at the cross-section of Information Management, Organizational Design, and Personal Productivity.
• Practice the 24-Hour Rule: The 24-Hour Rule is the golden rule of great documentation practices. You must rewrite, reprocess or rethink your notes within 24 hours of hearing the information. Check out more information here.
• Treat meeting notes as sacred: Meeting notes are a critical documentation practice. Come up with a way of documenting your meeting notes.
• Think of what intellectual capital you have and capture it better: Think of what you can offer the world. Perhaps you are the only one who knows how to run a certain process. Maybe you want to document your recipes to share with your kids. Whatever. We all have something to offer —the trick is to capture it.
• Embrace grunt work: Don’t shy away from taking notes in meetings. Don’t be embarrassed to reorganize the team’s files. Be ok with getting your documents ripped apart. Be ok with making lists. Documentation is not sexy in itself, but the rewards may be. (I have also called this shit work too.)
• Write more: Find the opportunity to write more in general. The more you write, the better you will get at it. This will make you a better documenter and better writer. You don’t need a fancy course. Just grab opportunities where you can.
• Write fast and efficiently: Practice writing with speed, not perfection. You will accelerate your ability to focus and give your work a “hard push”. In today’s overly distracted world, this is an invaluable skill.
• Template your work and life: Get a handle on templates that will help you and your business and your life. They can be simple, but powerful nonetheless. They will give you a starting point and will allow you to scale your work faster both through gaining more speed or else expanding with other projects or clients.
• Track your to-dos and project lists: I can’t advise on a perfect system. But in general, write down more of your to-dos and move them to your calendar. This is the capturing part of our personal, home and work life. This is about putting something on paper that turns to action.
• Capture your ideas. You can capture in a journal, in your blog file, or even on Twitter. Get great at capturing your ideas and take time to treat them sacredly.
• Make your documents fun to read. Even if you are doing an accounting manual, make your document fun to read. Documents need to engage their reader, no matter what they are about.
• Focus on where you are going, not what you have. Who cares if you have 30 years of files stored up? The past is the past as we say. Documentation is about where you are going and not about your past.
• Build a dynamic documentation philosophy. Your company or team needs the right philosophy for understanding how to turn documentation into their superpower.
• Think “lean”. Lean and dynamic and iterative all go hand in hand. Lean means biting off what you can chew, doing it quickly and then building on this.
• Build documentation into your team: Don't assume that your team knows how to document. You need to hire, monitor and evaluate your staff on their documentation skills.
• Improve your mental health. Use documentation to reduce the mental toll on your mind. Capture your notes so you don't have to remember what was said. Journal an angry thought to release it.
• Don’t be a documentation dork: Documentation is an end to greater means. Don’t obsess over documenting every meeting, recording everything you need to do, and everything you eat. That is not the point. You will lose a document. You will definitely not feel like recording everything you eat. Dynamic documentation is a process.
• Bop groundhogs on the head: Hunt out the groundhogs on your team, in your company, and in your life. Find the best path to exterminate them. If you don't know what I mean by this, check out this article here.
• Release your super brain: Your documentation system releases your super brain. Not needing to remember that meeting, your to-do list, how to solve that problem, how a process works, where you kept that file—it’s one less thing to stress about when you know your documentation has your back. Let documentation practices be your loyal assistant. When your assistant is working hard, you the CEO super brain is able to shine.

Are you looking for more information to help you improve your team’s documentation? I have many more tricks up my sleeve! I’d love to hear from you. Contact me at [email protected] to talk more about improving your documentation.