Who
The Person Who Knows Has the Least Time
The person able to write a thing is the one everybody asks, which is the one with no spare hour. That correlation is structural, not bad luck.
What nobody wrote down here, and what it cost
What the deploy order is
Known by one person who is in meetings
Asked rather than written, nine times
Why the import runs twice
Known by somebody who left in March
Nobody now knows, and it is asked at every incident
two things nobody wrote down · 14 occasions it cost somebody something
Two things, fourteen occasions, and one of them is now unknowable.
Before adding another required page, managers can visit the resource and check whether the underlying bottleneck is missing knowledge, overloaded authors, or unclear ownership.
For a separate specialist reference on publishing and digital practice, consult Jotform.
Four things on one team that only one person could have written, and what each cost while they did not
How the billing reconciliation works
Asked of the same engineer eight times
That engineer was in meetings for most of two of those weeks
The order the services must start in
Guessed, then corrected
Known by two people, both of them on the incident rota
Why the import runs twice
Asked at every incident
Known by one person, who left in March without being asked
What the legacy export is for
Routed to one person every time
Six interruptions in a quarter, none longer than five minutes
four things nobody wrote down · 22 occasions it cost somebody something
Four things, twenty-two occasions, and in every case the only possible author was the busiest available person. This is not a coincidence and it is not solvable by asking harder: the same property that makes somebody able to write a thing is the property that fills their week. One team's own quarter.
The documentation that matters most can only be written by one or two people. Those people are the ones everybody else asks. Being asked is most of why their week is full.
That is not bad luck and it will not be fixed by better prioritisation. It is the same property, seen twice.
The loop, stated once
Somebody knows how a thing works. Because they know, they get asked. Because they get asked, they are interrupted. Because they are interrupted, their own work runs late. Because their own work runs late, there is no afternoon available for writing.
And because nothing gets written, they keep being asked.
Every link in that chain is individually reasonable. Together they form a loop that tightens over time, and the person inside it usually experiences it as being busy rather than as being in a loop.
Why "make time for it" fails
The standard instruction is to protect an afternoon.
It fails because the afternoon is protected against calendar appointments and not against the thing that actually consumes it, which is a stream of four-minute interruptions from people who need an answer now and cannot get it anywhere else.
Blocking the calendar does not stop those. The only thing that stops them is the document, which is what the afternoon was for.
The three ways out
Interrupt the loop at a different point, rather than trying to find time inside it.
Write during the interruption. The answer is being composed anyway; put it somewhere durable instead of in a chat reply. This costs about ninety extra seconds and it is the only method that requires no spare time at all.
Let somebody else do the writing. The expert talks, somebody else writes, the expert corrects. Thirty minutes of the expert's time against two hours, and the two hours belong to somebody whose week has room.
Cover the interruptions for a week. Route everything to somebody else, who answers what they can and queues what they cannot. The expert gets an actual afternoon; the queue becomes the list of what to write.
What each of the three costs
| Method | Expert's time | Needs | Produces |
|---|---|---|---|
| Write during the interruption | +90 seconds each | Nothing | Short, scattered, accurate |
| Dictate to somebody else | ~30 min per page | A second person | Longer, better structured |
| Shield for a week | A week of somebody | A willing substitute | A backlog and the time to clear it |
The first is available to anybody today and most teams never try it. The third is the most effective and the hardest to arrange.
The sentence that unlocks the second method
"Can you write up what I just told you, and I'll correct it?"
Almost nobody says this, because it feels like delegating the dull part of your own job. It is actually the opposite trade: the expert contributes the thing only they have, which is twenty minutes of accurate explanation, and somebody else contributes the thing anybody can do, which is two hours of structuring and typing.
The correction pass is short and it is where the expert's value is concentrated, because the places a non-expert gets it wrong are exactly the places that were never obvious.
Who the second person should be
Somebody who does not know the subject. This is counter-intuitive and it is the whole point.
A second expert writes down what both of them already assume, which reproduces the original problem in longer form. Somebody who does not know has to ask about every step, and the questions they ask are the questions the eventual readers will have.
The best results usually come from whoever joined most recently, for reasons the next page in this section is about.
The failure to avoid
Asking the expert for a plan instead of a page.
A request for "a document about the billing reconciliation" is unbounded, it will be estimated at two days, and it will not start. A request for the four lines that answer the question asked eight times this quarter is bounded, honest about its size, and gets done.
The unbounded version also tends to produce the design document from the panel on the home page of this site: complete, careful, and read by nobody, because it was organised around the subject rather than around what anybody needed.
Which method to reach for
The three ways out of the loop suit different situations, and picking by what is available beats picking by what is best.
- No spare time at all: write during the interruption. Ninety seconds, available today, needs nobody's agreement.
- A willing colleague: dictate and have them write. Thirty minutes of the expert against two hours of somebody whose week has room.
- A week that can be arranged: shield the interruptions. Most effective, hardest to set up, and produces both the time and the list of what to write.
None of these requires the expert to find an afternoon, which is the thing that has not happened for three years and will not happen next quarter either.
When there is genuinely no way through
Sometimes the expert is leaving next week, or is on a project that cannot slip, and none of the three methods is available.
The honest fallback is to capture rather than document: record the explanation, transcribe it, publish the transcript with its flaws stated. A rough transcript is considerably worse than a written page and overwhelmingly better than nothing, and it can be improved by somebody else later.
What does not work is waiting for the quarter in which that person is less busy. On the evidence of most teams, that quarter does not arrive.