One of my favourite lies to tell myself at work is: when this project is done, I’ll do all the documentation, and it will be amazing!

Even when it’s your intention to neatly finish off a project with a few days to document, something always comes up – the project runs long and/or you’ve got to hop on a new one. And a lack of documentation isn’t immediately an issue, so you can put it off. But when it’s a problem, it’s a big one!

Today, we’re going talk about documenting as you go: a much more realistic, achievable, and less boring way to save the important stuff.

⏰ 10-minute documentation

One habit I’ve kept up for many years is my end-of-week wrap up. I have a 30-minute block in my calendar every Friday afternoon to plan for next week, and I’ll note down what I did over the week. It usually only takes me 10 minutes, and you can always find 10 minutes.

Documentation isn’t just for others, it can also be just for you! If you manage to find 10 minutes once a week, it’s a great time to write down:

• What you worked on, plus links to everything

• Major decisions or pivots that happened this week

• Open questions or next steps

Then if you ever need to find anything, or you want to process it into something more formal, it’s easy to scan through later.

(If you want to read a bit more about my normal end-of-week wrap up, I wrote about it here.)

💬 Leverage your comms channels

Most of you will be using a tool like Slack or Teams at work on top of email, and they can be really powerful for live documenting. I recommend making a formal channel for sharing updates with your stakeholders – group chats are hard to find quickly, and you don’t want it mixed it with your team collaborating on the project.

Some ways to get the most out of live documenting on Slack:

• Give it an easy-to-find name, ideally following a structure that you can use continuously. Where I work, we start all feature release channels with #fr- so that they’re easy to find.

• Manage posting permissions in the channel so that only certain team members can post announcements. This means that the channel doesn’t get cluttered up with questions or confusion, it’s just one-way. (This is a paid upgrade on Slack.)

  • If you don’t pay for this tier of Slack, you could also recommend strongly that people have discussions in threads to ensure the main channel isn’t cluttered.

• Pin the latest updates so that it’s highlighted and obvious to people scanning through for information.

• Bookmark key links, like the design files, Jira board, or anything else that people are likely to need.

• Use a consistent post structure so that people get used to what they’re looking at. You might even adopt emojis with headings for easy scanning, like “🚀 Available now,” “🚧 Known bugs,” or “⚠️ Blockers.”

• Archive the channel when your project is done and no longer in active development.

It’s been a few years since I’ve used Teams (thankfully) so the terminology might be different over there. But you can definitely leverage it for the same impact!

📍 Context is king

A lot of people think that documentation = a big text document with some pictures. It doesn’t – and shouldn’t! – be that way; the best documentation is contextual. Where possible, document inline so that the reasoning is right where you need it, like:

• commenting your code,

• annotating directly on Figma,

• asking and resolving questions directly on Jira.

When you’re adding your inline context, you might also be able to capture some more specific thinking decisions rather than just behaviours. So you don’t just explain what will happen, but you can also explore why this way and not another.

🔍️ Make it easy to find

The worst thing about documentation is usually that it’s buried and irretrievable, making it… totally useless. The best documentation is easily findable.

Your company might already have some structures around documentation, but here are a few things you can consider to make it easier to find:

• Follow guidelines for where to house specific documentation. For example, all PRDs live in Notion on this page, all designs live in Figma using this folder structure, all Slack channels follow this naming convention. That way, when you’re searching for a specific artefact, you can go straight to the one place you know it lives.

• Cross-link relevant files or pages. Even though everything should have its own home, project documentation is always spread across different apps for the same project. In your key pages, have links to everything else, eg. the Jira project, the Figma file, the help centre.

• Use consistent naming for your project. Once you settle on a name, make sure everything across all of your apps uses that same name so that it’s easy to search. (We’re guilty of naming our design files totally differently, and it makes it so much tougher to dig up what you need.)

Documentation can feel daunting and boring, but it doesn’t have to be! Have any of these tips made you think differently about how you can improve your documentation process? 🤔