From ‘Kind of Sort of’ to ‘Crystal Clear’: The Case for Thorough Task Documentation
Intro
Recently a coworker ran into an issue that took several hours and a lot of stress to sort out. I ran into the same issue two or three years ago and vaguely remembered the five minute fix he needed to resolve his issue. However, because I never documented the process to perform this task, my explanation to him was a little fuzzy and he didn’t understand what I was trying to tell him. Which is what lead to him wasting hours on this.
While my communication in this situation wasn’t the best. I believe the root cause was the fact that I only “kind of sort of” remembered what I was talking about. It’s hard to clearly express what you don’t clearly understand. Had I done a better job of documenting the correct procedure I could have saved my coworker a lot of stress and time.
Issues in development and SEO
This is something I see often in both web development and search engine optimization (SEO). The truly day to day tasks become so repetitive to us that we can usually get away with doing them from memory, at least until we need to train a new person. The odd ball one off requests don’t come up often enough to get a lot of value out of documentation, because you’ll probably never run into them again. But in the middle there are tasks that we do often enough to THINK we know what we are doing, but infrequent enough that there is always something we forget.
For me these tend to be tasks that I do quarterly. Infrequent enough that I tend to forget exactly what I am doing and end up getting stuck, or doing them incorrectly and having to repeat. But frequent enough that 30-60 minutes wasted trying to remember what I did last time, adds up and ends up hurting my productivity.
I have started stepping back and looking at each of my personal tasks as a manager who needs to train a new person on how to do them. Even if they are tasks that I ALWAYS do, I try to look at them in this light. Then I create a step by step list of how to complete the task. Sometimes this is written in Google Docs, sometimes I add some screenshots, other times (and I’m trying to move more this way) I use Loom or some other video service to record the whole process. Or, my favorite for step by step documenting of digital tasks, Tango.
Two Johns
When manager John does a good job of documenting, then the John that is doing boring low level tasks has a much easier time and is able to get back to the more “important” things quicker.
Training Others
This documentation becomes even more important when we are trying to train a new person. I keep a library of common tasks and when I need to assign a task to someone, I can often give them a quick description and a link to my library and send them off and running.
I’m often reminded of a business owner I worked with several years ago. He had a single employee who had helped him for years, but only worked part time. He had been looking to hire someone new as business grew. But he struggled to teach others how to perform tasks to his liking and thus didn’t have time to onboard someone effectively. As business grew he became increasingly busier, having less and less time to get someone up to speed. This put a hard cap on how much he could grow, and lead to him needing to outsource work to another company, which is where I came in.
I had enough experience in the field to provide some assistance, but honestly even with my expertise, he had a lot of personal preferences that I was unaware of and wasn’t able to fully satisfied his demands. Meanwhile he was paying my company about 10X what he could have paid a new employee to handle the same tasks. All because of his inability to document or explain his preferred method of operating. Had he been able to provide some form of documentation, he would have been far better positioned to handle the growth he was experiencing.
In my opinion, this inability to effectively teach is the biggest reason why so many freelancers are unable to ever grow into a company with employees. Instead they forever stay a single person operation, or they add a team member or two, but are never able to get them up to speed enough to afford to keep them onboard.