Counting

Making it count for the person who did it

Nobody knows a document helped, including the person it helped, and nothing in an ordinary week carries that back to the author.

What nobody wrote down here, and what it cost

That the runbook saved somebody a morning

Nobody told the author

Six occasions, none reported back

6 times

That a note ended an argument

The author never heard

Both times from people who joined later

2 times

two things nobody wrote down · 8 occasions it cost somebody something

Two things, eight occasions, and the author heard about none of them.

Nobody Knows It Helped, Including the Reader

A page's benefit is experienced privately, by somebody who does not know who wrote it, weeks after the writing — so the author learns nothing at all.

One sentence to the person who wrote a page is the only feedback that ever crosses the gap, it costs fifteen seconds, and almost nobody sends it.

If writing appears nowhere in how work is judged, it competes with work that does, and loses every time for perfectly rational reasons.

Open counts are the only available evidence that a page was used, and almost every way of reading them is wrong in a predictable direction.

A short read by one person who does not know the subject finds more than any amount of the author re-reading, and it costs about ten minutes.

A page with no name and no date cannot be thanked, corrected, credited or judged for currency, and all four of those cost something.

Most of what managers try does not work. Four things do, none of them is an initiative, and three of them cost nothing.

A documentation target produces documentation-shaped output, in the required quantity, read by nobody. The mechanism is not cynicism.