About this site

What it covers

The arithmetic underneath the whole problem: a document costs one identifiable person a block of time in a particular hour, and the benefit arrives later, spread thinly across people who will never know what it saved them. Who is actually able to write a given thing, which is rarely the person asked. What writing genuinely costs, including the parts nobody counts. The handful of things that make writing cheap enough to happen. Whether any of it can be made to count for the person who did it. And the residue that no arrangement reaches.

The argument running through it

Teams do not fail to write things down because they are lazy or because they do not understand the value. Almost every team understands the value; most of them say so out loud, repeatedly, for years, while continuing not to write. That is not a belief problem. It is a cost-allocation problem, and it is worth treating as one.

What it is not

It is not a guide to what to write or how to structure it. There is a great deal of good writing about information architecture, and none of it helps with a page that never gets started.

It is not about remote or asynchronous work. Those have their own problems and their own literature; this one applies equally to a team that shares an office.

It is not advice about any particular team. Every figure used here is an illustration of what one team recorded about its own quarter, labelled as such on the page where it appears. No benchmark is offered and none is implied.

It is also not legal or employment advice. What an employer may require of somebody, what counts as working time, how work is assessed and what may be expected of a particular role all differ by jurisdiction and by contract, and they change. Those are questions for somebody qualified in the place concerned.