“Documentation is how we care for one another.” My team and I heard this at a content strategy conference and regularly quote it to one another. It reframes a chore into a value in action 🫶
Usually I am the one changing slidedecks, editing documents in the production folder and sharing new ideas -prototype vibecoded and shared in Teams- intending to document all of it later that day. Never happens or half heartedly.
Finding out how much work that meant for my colleagues helped me be more earnest in that. So your quote resonates a lot.
Todoist Ramble, Whisper Memos help because dictating is easier and faster than typing. Or having Claude Cowork compare versions and create a list those makes it easier.
Still, the root cause fix would mean log while doing 🤓
I always look forward to the first of the month because I know one of your posts is coming. They always give me something worthwhile to think about.
I tend to be a documenter by nature, always trying to get everyone on the same page, whether at home, at work, or while volunteering. I'm a systems person by default. At work, we've adopted Notion to build out what we've been calling a wiki, although I'm now loving the term "information bank."
My biggest takeaway from this post was the idea of talking through the steps out loud while I'm doing them. That feels so much more natural and efficient than trying to recreate the process later from memory.
I was recently promoted to Director of Operations, and one of the ways I encourage people to document the essentials is by asking, "What would we do if you won the lottery, gave immediate notice, and moved to a remote island?" It gets the point across without relying on the old "hit by a bus" analogy.
I'm always looking for better ways to document what I do because there is so much that never makes it into a job description. My current project is simply capturing all of those loose ends in one place. Even if I only end up with a list for now, that's enough. I'm also continuing to build templates for recurring processes where having the steps clearly documented is especially helpful, like onboarding new employees and fiscal year-end transitions.
And who knows... maybe someday I'll be the one who wins the lottery and moves to a remote island. If that happens, I hope I've left behind a really good information bank. 😊
Congrats on your promotion, Tracey! That's wonderful news! Having a list of the loose ends to document is something I hadn't thought of (surprisingly 😆). That's a great idea. I'm going to start this today.
Ps. If you win the lottery and move to a remote island, I want to come visit! 🏝️
Dear Naomi, this is such an inspiring and useful article, thank you so much for sharing it! My company has flowcharts and official checklists and documents as part of the Quality Management System, however, those were made by people who don't have to work on a day-to-day basis with crappy SAP instances or outdated buggy programs (or your boss' inability to properly name a file before saving it), so my solution was to document scraps and bits and pieces of information as they came around and create a sort of administration handbook in OneNote. It was meant for future me (some tasks are done only once a year for example) but that turned out to be extremely useful to share with the new employee who took over my role earlier this year. It basically looks like a commonplace book of admin procedures divided by topics and it kind of works.
I have to admit that I've been not so bad in documenting my job in administration over the past 4 years, however, I have never found a way to make it easier on me, I dreaded every time I had to document stuff, so I find your advice (especially about integrating AI) very useful. I'm still very clumsy (and slightly scared) when it comes to AI but Todoist's approach is quite on my alley and I'd like to thank you for making it look less complicated and scary with a pragmatic approach!
So lovely to get a peek into your way of working, Alice. "I have never found a way to make it easier on me" - here's hoping that over time we'll be able to help you with that. ❤️
I know this is a newsletter for ToDoist (which I love using!!!). But for documentation I love using the tool Scribe ✨️ You just let it record your screen while doing a task you want to document and it automatically creates a how-to with screenshots & links 🔥 Of course it needs some tweaking afterwards, but I've found it to be sooo helpful (and the colleagues that took my work during my holidays and after I left the company are also big fans of it!) 🙏🏼
Lisanne, I'm so glad you commented this, because I've been considering using Scribe. I just hadn't heard of anyone trying it. The only downside I could see is that it seems all of the documentation then lives in Scribe. We have a company handbook in Outline. Do you export any of your procedure docs? Or just share the Scibe link with folks? 👀
Yes, it works best if you host the documentation in Scribe! However, I always just used links in our standard documentation to the relevant Scribe page and it worked like a charm! ✨️ I think it's also possible to export a Scribe page as a PDF, so that would also be an option. But then sometimes the layout would become weird and you couldn't customize it :/ I also vaguely remember that there were more options in a paid plan, but I don't remember the details. So you should check with them instead 🙏🏼
Reading the newsletter is like a reminder to me of what one of my undergrad classes is about: knowledge management. Basically, you have to "document" or express your tacit knowledge in a way that other people (or your organization) may also benefit from. Well, there are things that only us knew how to do so putting it into tangible words would greatly help!
Search it up, folks! There's so much to know about it: KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
There are other people at Todoist who are PROs in knowledge management. I think I need to spend a little more time learning about this. Another productivity rabbit hole! In I go... 🕳️
For me an eye opener was The Extended Mind. The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain byAnnie Murphy Paul. She makes a great case for off loading what is on your mind and that thinking is not best done alone (as in Rodin’s The Thinker). As a doer maybe her advice to think moving, think social, prototype etc can be useful (and more fun).
This was a good one. I would love to hear more about todoist strategies to manage personal and home life with as much automation as possible. Everyone in my household is Einstein/Picasso/Mr. Magoo. Everyone is always on a hyperfocused quest, so "to dos" are always overlooked distractions. Undefined and overwhelming. We need a home operations manual. Meanwhile, "Look what I made!"
If you wrote this book, I would buy it in a heartbeat.
Paula, sounds like you're describing my house. We're super good at the creative and fun side of things, and then things like "hem curtains" and "feed plants" tend to go by the wayside. For those kinds of routine tasks, I really don't know what I'd do without Todoist. In both work and life.
The automation layer is relatively new, but it's something we're going to release soon. Keep an eye out! 👀
This is so good!! I am always needing to document more but hadn't thought of letting AI help. BTW, in my world we call this "beer-trucking ourselves". We have a morbid sense of humor - but the idea is "if I got run over by a beer truck tomorrow, what would my team need in order to carry on successfully without me".
Honestly, Liad, not as much as I'd like. But I do heavily use AI now to help with things like meal planning, holiday planning, schedule management etc. So I would certainly benefit from more documentation there.
Brain dump it's one of the most advantageous thing we can do today in a world full of informationz noise. Agree with you. Now I'll think to create a system to fit my needs for that and thank you for the connector! This is a game changer!
A terrific, highly useful post for anyone to operationalize. I have just one tip... apply it to your personal life as well. In my coaching with people re: Whole Life Productivity I often find they're in worse shape when it comes to organizing their non-work lives, sometimes until too late. Their unique store of personal systems, practices and information dies with them, compounding the impact of their passing on those left to pick up the pieces. One of our most important end of life investments is preparing those closest to us to embrace the future without unnecessary barriers.
So with you on this Peter! I'm very good at creating systems for my home, but they all live in my head and aren't often documented. I once saw someone online who had a "home operations manual" and honestly, it made me so jealous. Perhaps that's the next step!
I was working with a team that struggle with constant DMs on the same topic. So I asked: have you thought of creating an information bank on this topic so they don't reach out to you but know where to find the answer? That's what they did. And they also realized it was a training problem. So that's to your point 1 on what's worth documenting. Thanks Naomi
I've long struggled with this exact same thing. Somewhat lately (over the last six months or so), I've adopted a mental model of using Obsidian to document the past and Todoist to document the future. Tools come and go (I keep experimenting) to capture and pipe to those, but that's the gist.
To tie the two together, I use a plugin that puts my completed tasks for each day into a note to reference later. It's not perfect, but it at least saves some of it for posterity. But I don't have a good way to turn my documentation into a set of tasks to repeat it. Sometimes that involves several linked notes too, so it's not super trivial. I'm working on a solution for that direction of flow. Any suggestions are welcome.
I think it's helping. The existing bar is low. Only time will tell though.
Hey Jake! You might find it easier to set up automations like this with our new tool, Automations. It's currently being tested, but if you'd be interested in helping us test it, feel free to email me at naomi@doist.com and I'll get your account hooked up.
Thanks so much for the feedback, how folks tool stacks play together is going to be key in future.
I have the opposite problem: I have always been a super documentation creator (in fact, I was originally assigned to my IT department because the CIO wanted someone there to encourage/create more documentation) but it’s nearly impossible to get people to read it, or actually follow steps completely vs skipping important bits they don’t understand why needed. For one of my main app admin duties I set up a custom ChatGPT helper using all of my documentation as source/context - now when I am OOO my boss uses that, because he had complained there were too many words in the original docs.
Absolutely love that you've created an AI helper for your team, Betty. That's such a beautiful use of all your hard work on that documentation. Well done!
“Documentation is how we care for one another.” My team and I heard this at a content strategy conference and regularly quote it to one another. It reframes a chore into a value in action 🫶
🎯 Nailed it Lauren! I'm definitely stealing that one.
Usually I am the one changing slidedecks, editing documents in the production folder and sharing new ideas -prototype vibecoded and shared in Teams- intending to document all of it later that day. Never happens or half heartedly.
Finding out how much work that meant for my colleagues helped me be more earnest in that. So your quote resonates a lot.
Todoist Ramble, Whisper Memos help because dictating is easier and faster than typing. Or having Claude Cowork compare versions and create a list those makes it easier.
Still, the root cause fix would mean log while doing 🤓
Totally with you Arjan! "Finding out how much work that meant for my colleagues" <- This is a big motivator for me too!
I always look forward to the first of the month because I know one of your posts is coming. They always give me something worthwhile to think about.
I tend to be a documenter by nature, always trying to get everyone on the same page, whether at home, at work, or while volunteering. I'm a systems person by default. At work, we've adopted Notion to build out what we've been calling a wiki, although I'm now loving the term "information bank."
My biggest takeaway from this post was the idea of talking through the steps out loud while I'm doing them. That feels so much more natural and efficient than trying to recreate the process later from memory.
I was recently promoted to Director of Operations, and one of the ways I encourage people to document the essentials is by asking, "What would we do if you won the lottery, gave immediate notice, and moved to a remote island?" It gets the point across without relying on the old "hit by a bus" analogy.
I'm always looking for better ways to document what I do because there is so much that never makes it into a job description. My current project is simply capturing all of those loose ends in one place. Even if I only end up with a list for now, that's enough. I'm also continuing to build templates for recurring processes where having the steps clearly documented is especially helpful, like onboarding new employees and fiscal year-end transitions.
And who knows... maybe someday I'll be the one who wins the lottery and moves to a remote island. If that happens, I hope I've left behind a really good information bank. 😊
Congrats on your promotion, Tracey! That's wonderful news! Having a list of the loose ends to document is something I hadn't thought of (surprisingly 😆). That's a great idea. I'm going to start this today.
Ps. If you win the lottery and move to a remote island, I want to come visit! 🏝️
Dear Naomi, this is such an inspiring and useful article, thank you so much for sharing it! My company has flowcharts and official checklists and documents as part of the Quality Management System, however, those were made by people who don't have to work on a day-to-day basis with crappy SAP instances or outdated buggy programs (or your boss' inability to properly name a file before saving it), so my solution was to document scraps and bits and pieces of information as they came around and create a sort of administration handbook in OneNote. It was meant for future me (some tasks are done only once a year for example) but that turned out to be extremely useful to share with the new employee who took over my role earlier this year. It basically looks like a commonplace book of admin procedures divided by topics and it kind of works.
I have to admit that I've been not so bad in documenting my job in administration over the past 4 years, however, I have never found a way to make it easier on me, I dreaded every time I had to document stuff, so I find your advice (especially about integrating AI) very useful. I'm still very clumsy (and slightly scared) when it comes to AI but Todoist's approach is quite on my alley and I'd like to thank you for making it look less complicated and scary with a pragmatic approach!
So lovely to get a peek into your way of working, Alice. "I have never found a way to make it easier on me" - here's hoping that over time we'll be able to help you with that. ❤️
I know this is a newsletter for ToDoist (which I love using!!!). But for documentation I love using the tool Scribe ✨️ You just let it record your screen while doing a task you want to document and it automatically creates a how-to with screenshots & links 🔥 Of course it needs some tweaking afterwards, but I've found it to be sooo helpful (and the colleagues that took my work during my holidays and after I left the company are also big fans of it!) 🙏🏼
Lisanne, I'm so glad you commented this, because I've been considering using Scribe. I just hadn't heard of anyone trying it. The only downside I could see is that it seems all of the documentation then lives in Scribe. We have a company handbook in Outline. Do you export any of your procedure docs? Or just share the Scibe link with folks? 👀
Yes, it works best if you host the documentation in Scribe! However, I always just used links in our standard documentation to the relevant Scribe page and it worked like a charm! ✨️ I think it's also possible to export a Scribe page as a PDF, so that would also be an option. But then sometimes the layout would become weird and you couldn't customize it :/ I also vaguely remember that there were more options in a paid plan, but I don't remember the details. So you should check with them instead 🙏🏼
Reading the newsletter is like a reminder to me of what one of my undergrad classes is about: knowledge management. Basically, you have to "document" or express your tacit knowledge in a way that other people (or your organization) may also benefit from. Well, there are things that only us knew how to do so putting it into tangible words would greatly help!
Search it up, folks! There's so much to know about it: KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
There are other people at Todoist who are PROs in knowledge management. I think I need to spend a little more time learning about this. Another productivity rabbit hole! In I go... 🕳️
For me an eye opener was The Extended Mind. The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain byAnnie Murphy Paul. She makes a great case for off loading what is on your mind and that thinking is not best done alone (as in Rodin’s The Thinker). As a doer maybe her advice to think moving, think social, prototype etc can be useful (and more fun).
Super intrigued by this concept Arjan, I'm going to go explore!
Here a bit more: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cognitive-offloading-ja-graag-arjan-broere-xigre There will be a Translate button I guess
This was a good one. I would love to hear more about todoist strategies to manage personal and home life with as much automation as possible. Everyone in my household is Einstein/Picasso/Mr. Magoo. Everyone is always on a hyperfocused quest, so "to dos" are always overlooked distractions. Undefined and overwhelming. We need a home operations manual. Meanwhile, "Look what I made!"
If you wrote this book, I would buy it in a heartbeat.
Paula, sounds like you're describing my house. We're super good at the creative and fun side of things, and then things like "hem curtains" and "feed plants" tend to go by the wayside. For those kinds of routine tasks, I really don't know what I'd do without Todoist. In both work and life.
The automation layer is relatively new, but it's something we're going to release soon. Keep an eye out! 👀
This is so good!! I am always needing to document more but hadn't thought of letting AI help. BTW, in my world we call this "beer-trucking ourselves". We have a morbid sense of humor - but the idea is "if I got run over by a beer truck tomorrow, what would my team need in order to carry on successfully without me".
Hahaha!! Beer trucking. I like that.
Thank you, Naomi. You definitely gave me some things to think about regarding my current work. Do you document personal projects as well?
Honestly, Liad, not as much as I'd like. But I do heavily use AI now to help with things like meal planning, holiday planning, schedule management etc. So I would certainly benefit from more documentation there.
Great insights from a human :)
Thank you @Naomi!
Brain dump it's one of the most advantageous thing we can do today in a world full of informationz noise. Agree with you. Now I'll think to create a system to fit my needs for that and thank you for the connector! This is a game changer!
There are few things more cathartic than a good old brain dump, I agree Marius! Can't wait to hear more about how you're using the connectors!
A terrific, highly useful post for anyone to operationalize. I have just one tip... apply it to your personal life as well. In my coaching with people re: Whole Life Productivity I often find they're in worse shape when it comes to organizing their non-work lives, sometimes until too late. Their unique store of personal systems, practices and information dies with them, compounding the impact of their passing on those left to pick up the pieces. One of our most important end of life investments is preparing those closest to us to embrace the future without unnecessary barriers.
So with you on this Peter! I'm very good at creating systems for my home, but they all live in my head and aren't often documented. I once saw someone online who had a "home operations manual" and honestly, it made me so jealous. Perhaps that's the next step!
Yes!!!! Documentation is a love letter to your future self!!! I even made stickers to spread the love 8^D
https://dillieodev.printful.me/
I was working with a team that struggle with constant DMs on the same topic. So I asked: have you thought of creating an information bank on this topic so they don't reach out to you but know where to find the answer? That's what they did. And they also realized it was a training problem. So that's to your point 1 on what's worth documenting. Thanks Naomi
Why is it that "information bank" sounds so much more inviting than documentation? Maybe I need to adopt your wording, Kate!
We can be playful with wording as much as we want :) The point is keep asking the right questions instead of trying to do everything, and all at once.
I've long struggled with this exact same thing. Somewhat lately (over the last six months or so), I've adopted a mental model of using Obsidian to document the past and Todoist to document the future. Tools come and go (I keep experimenting) to capture and pipe to those, but that's the gist.
To tie the two together, I use a plugin that puts my completed tasks for each day into a note to reference later. It's not perfect, but it at least saves some of it for posterity. But I don't have a good way to turn my documentation into a set of tasks to repeat it. Sometimes that involves several linked notes too, so it's not super trivial. I'm working on a solution for that direction of flow. Any suggestions are welcome.
I think it's helping. The existing bar is low. Only time will tell though.
Hey Jake! You might find it easier to set up automations like this with our new tool, Automations. It's currently being tested, but if you'd be interested in helping us test it, feel free to email me at naomi@doist.com and I'll get your account hooked up.
Thanks so much for the feedback, how folks tool stacks play together is going to be key in future.
I have the opposite problem: I have always been a super documentation creator (in fact, I was originally assigned to my IT department because the CIO wanted someone there to encourage/create more documentation) but it’s nearly impossible to get people to read it, or actually follow steps completely vs skipping important bits they don’t understand why needed. For one of my main app admin duties I set up a custom ChatGPT helper using all of my documentation as source/context - now when I am OOO my boss uses that, because he had complained there were too many words in the original docs.
Absolutely love that you've created an AI helper for your team, Betty. That's such a beautiful use of all your hard work on that documentation. Well done!