🗃️July: Free your mind

Why writing things down matters more now than ever.

I’ve always been more of a doer than a documenter.

Give me a task, even a boring one I’ve done forty times, and my instinct is to put my head down and just get it done. Writing down how I do it always feels like a tax on getting it finished. Why spend fifteen minutes describing a job I could do in five?

So I don’t. Which means an alarming amount of how things work around here exists in my head. All the strategy, the tactics, the little steps, and workarounds. They’ve become a smug little filing cabinet that only I have the key to. 🗄️

In my last performance review, I realized this shortcoming and made it an official development goal: get better at documenting. Stop being the filing cabinet.

There are only six months left in 2026. Jumpscare.

So it’s time for me to grade my own homework. 😬 Let me share with you what I’ve learned in the last few months of Naomi-gets-better-at-documenting.

Why writing it down matters more now than ever

I set that goal thinking I was just tidying up after myself. Creating somewhat pointless documents that nobody will open.

But over the last year, writing things down has gone from a nice-to-have admin task to one of the most genuinely useful things I can do. And here’s why:

• You can’t hand work to a person if the how-to lives only in your head. This was always true, but with new folks recently joining our team, it was becoming increasingly essential for me to share my legos.

• You can’t hand it to AI either. These tools are only as clever as the context you feed them. The people getting real leverage from AI are not necessarily the power prompters, but rather those who live and die by documentation.

• You can’t see what’s automatable until it’s written down. It’s all habit and instinct, invisible by definition. Writing it out drags the repetitive bits out of you, where you can finally spot what a machine could be doing instead of you.

The boring admin job I'd dodged for years turned out to be the thing standing between me and the strategy work I’m always crying that I have no time for. 🙃

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What’s actually worth documenting

So, of the million+ pieces of context relating to your work and life, how do you determine what’s worth documenting?

• The “they always ask me” task. The same question landing in your DMs again and again is proof that other people need the information. The answer should live somewhere easily accessible to them, not in your brain.

• The thing you do on autopilot. The monthly reports, the weekly scheduling, the steps you could do in your sleep. Invisible to you, baffling to everyone else, and usually the most automatable.

• The task you dread handing over. That “ugh, it’s easier to just do it myself” is a tell. Listen, if AI is going to help us do anything, it should be the annoying work that feels too complex to give to anybody.

• And at home: the things that “just happen”. I have an almost teenage son who gets paid to do household chores beyond the basic ones (those are simply teamwork). As he wants to take on more, we’ve started listing out the bin collection dates, deep-clean tasks, and laundry rotation. Adding it to Todoist and handing those tasks to him has felt like one of the biggest parenting unlocks in a while. 😌

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How to capture it without it becoming a second job

The reason I never documented anything is the blank page. Writing up a process from scratch is its own dreary task, and one I am never in the mood to do.

So I stopped writing them from scratch and narrate instead. Here’s my go-to method:

1. Catch yourself mid-task. Don’t schedule “documentation time” – you’ll never do it. Wait until you’re actually doing one of the jobs, then document it while it’s in front of you.

2. Talk, don’t type. Narrate what you’re doing out loud to your AI tool of choice (Claude, for me), as if you’re explaining it to the person who’ll use it.

3. Screenshot the fiddly bits. The screen everyone gets stuck on, the setting nobody can find, the button that isn’t where you’d expect. Drop them after your verbal download.

4. Let it do the writing-up. Hand your ramblings and your screenshots over and let it turn them into a clean, ordered set of steps.

5. Tidy and park it. Give it a proofread, then drop it where it makes most sense. Maybe a company handbook or a Todoist project.

Note: There are a ton of ways to do this: a screen recording, a voice memo on a walk, or even forwarding that email where you once explained it all. The trick is capturing it however’s easiest, and letting AI do the tidy-up. “...Then you click the blue thing” is exactly the messy chat these tools are very good at straightening out.

Sometimes, I still find myself powering through repetitive tasks without documenting any of it. But I’m better than I was when the year began. For me, the motivator is freeing up my time for work I always want to do (but struggle to find time for).

Is there anything about your job that you do repeatedly that you know you should document?

If you’re a documentation queen/king, any tips for me? 👀

See you in the comments.

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

Joan Didion, Why I Write (1976)

Todoist Tip 💡

Last month we brought you a Claude connector; this month we’ve just launched an official Todoist app for ChatGPT. 🎉

If ChatGPT is where you already do your thinking, you can now point it at your Todoist without leaving the chat.

It connects in a minute or two from Settings → Apps in ChatGPT, and you can see (and revoke) exactly what you’ve granted any time from Todoist’s Settings → Integrations.

And tying it back to today’s theme: this is a pretty good way to get a process out of your head. Talk a task through with ChatGPT, let it shape the steps, and drop the result straight into Todoist without copy-pasting between tabs.

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Speaking of not being the single point of failure: if you’re the person trying to get a whole team onto Todoist, we’ve made you something.

The Todoist Toolkit is four short courses to get you all started – three for whoever’s running the rollout (getting people on board, setting up the workspace, and the bit everyone forgets: what happens after launch), plus one for the team members who just got the invite and have no idea where to start.

This one is personal to me because it’s what my squad has been working on for the last quarter. Marco, Rachel, Alicia, and I are happy to see it out in the world. 🐣

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The Todoist Team in the Wild 🦁

And because I love nothing more than to show off the people I work with, I thought it would be fun to start including some of their social posts in these newsletters so you can see what we’re all up to (and get the inside gossip).

• If anyone follows our CEO Amir, they know he’s always the first to leak what we’re working on (much to the marketing team’s dismay 😒) – so we confronted him about it. Go on Amir, explain yourself.

• Alex, our Lead Product Designer, is out there making sure he doesn’t miss a World Cup match.

• Nadia, our Head of People, shares the three things that are most important to succeed in tech, that I’d argue apply to any industry.

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I guess I’ll see you in August… Can you believe it? ⌛

Naomi (🙋‍♀️ real human) and the Todoist team

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