About Effective Documentation

Effective documentation (ED) is a method that I use and I teach for capturing information that is important or useful.

ED is defined by its rewards and by its actions. Here are some of the rewards.

1. Results: Use of your documentation system leads to more results and higher quality results; lots more and lots better.

2. Organization: Super easy to add, find, update, and delete information. Super easy to organize and reorganize information.

3. Effectiveness: You are a master at getting things done. Stress free productivity. Huge time savings. Information is kept in one place. Change the source and everything propagates. Super easy to capture all forms of information: handwriting, code, photos, audio, notes, pdfs, and so on.

Resources and Approach

There are many great resources and tools and approaches for capturing and organizing information. Here are some examples.

• Apps for Capturing Information: Evernote, Obsidian, Excel, Calendar, Contacts, Photos, and so forth.

• Organizing Systems: David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD), Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journal Method, Julie Morgenstern’s SPACE method, and so forth

• Physical Items: Bound notebooks, three ring binders, spiral notebooks, notepads, filing cabinets, note boxes, bulletin boards, and so on.

• Databases: Relational databases. Network graph databases. Document databases. The computer programming community has countless tools.

My conclusion based on many years to trying many things is that the best approach is to design your own system that takes advantage of the existing results. This approach is presented next.

ED: The Actions of the Method

1. Goal State: Write down the conditions that will exist in the future after your documentation system is working super well.

2. System Design. Figure out what system will work best for you. For example, my documentation system has the following components: A bound notebook, The Obsidian App, one bib file for capturing citations, several sketching apps, a camera, a two drawer filing cabinet, and so on. Next, build your system.

3. Execution. Document information in real time while making sure only a tiny percentage of your time, say 1%, is spent on documentation.

4. Growth. Make your documentation system better this week than it was last week. Repeat this over and over and over. Take small steps. The way to do this is to apply the method called Reflective Thinking (RT).