Write It Down Yo

Related to your professional job/career, quickly, what's in your head that isn't in someone else's? Why haven't you written it down? No, really, go write that down now. Even if it's a single sentence. Have you done it yet?

Here's a fun test. Either way, go make yourself come coffee or tea or a sandwich or something that'll force you to context switch. Now, come back to whatever-it-was you had in your brain. If you wrote it down, you can easily pick up where you left off. If not, well, good luck to you.

Humans have a pretty terrible working memory. The old adage is 7 +/- 2. Remember, that's for very simple things. In business/software/etc we're rarely dealing with simple things. Communicating those complex ideas to others becomes much easier when we write it down. It forces us to clarify what we're trying to communicate. Bonus points if you include pictures or diagrams.

This leads me to my next point: if you don't write something down, from your employer's perspective it doesn't exist. Wait, what? Yeah. If anything were to happen to you, that knowledge, all the time spent figuring something out is now gone, wasted. Remember the last cool idea you had for making something better? Imagine it gone from the world, permanently.

Feel that? Sucks doesn't it? Now you know what happens every time someone doesn't write something down. How many ideas, learnings, etc have been lost from the world because no one bothered to write it down?

Now that more people are working remotely it has exposed one of the greatest business risks: business tribal knowledge. Or, more explicitly, the fun conversations that happen between employees when they work in the same physical space. Talking about ideas tends to cement them into more brains than just one. But, again, if something happens, those ideas disappear. Working from home is effectively reducing the amount of business tribal knowledge. Let me be clear, this is a good thing. Business tribal knowledge is business risk. Unfortunately, I see far too few people writing down that knowledge in a form that someone else can access which is increasing the business risk even if it's decreasing tribal knowledge.

If you want to make a splash at your current (or future) company, write things down as you learn them. Once you've written them down, make sure they're accessible to others. Bonus points if you timestamp everything. Next time your manager or coworker asks you about that-process-that-only-you-know-about, link them to where you wrote down how it works and make yourself available for questions. BOOM, bonus points. You've just generated business value and become a force multiplier instead of a roadblock. It's also something you can bring up when it comes around to review/salary time.

Even better, when you leave that position, no matter the reason, you're going to leave a much better taste in everyone's mouth when they go to ask you about a thing. You're no longer there, but there's documentation they can reference. There's a piece of you still around that's still being helpful. People tend to remember stuff like that and at worst, you're remembered more fondly. The business world is a lot smaller than we assume. People talk, change jobs, and you run into them in the future.

In summary, write stuff down, make sure other people can access it, and make the world just a tiny bit better.