# Stop with All the Documentation By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2022-10-29 Very few people like the process of documenting their work. It is time-consuming and often not rewarding. However, it is easy to list the reasons why documentation is valuable. It helps you remember what you did, allows others to replicate your work, and is a vehicle to coherently summarize work. If all of these things are true, why do we still struggle with documentation? We struggle with documentation because most of what we work on is either insignificant or inconsequential to human progression. In other words, documenting the definition of a data element five layers deep within a profit-motivated business is pointless in the grand scheme of things. We do it not because it matters but because we feel compelled to do it by outside forces. Sometimes these are keep your job forces. Other times these are cultural forces such as believing it is the right thing to do. For example, the rise of science in the Enlightenment Era advocated for and saw [[success]] in documenting experiments to improve knowledge and technology. Thus, we believe documentation is what good people do. But we are no longer in the Enlightenment Era, and most of the low-hanging fruit from science has been discovered. Documentation is now a chore with limited upside. Being creatures of habit of bygone eras, we produce massive amounts of documentation and data in hopes of making more progress. Every day we produce more digital data than ever before to the point that new fields of study have emerged to figure out what all of it means. Doesn't that seem backward from the original intent of documentation? Isn't documentation supposed to summarize outcomes and ideas, not become the thing to study? This pivots highlights how far documentation has drifted into the realm of meaninglessness concerning human progress. Whether we recognize it or not, we all intuitively feel the pain with modern-day documentation. If your job requires documentation, it is [[Pragmatic]] to continue. However, in other situations, consider two documentation questions: does this help me move forward and does this help humanity move forward? If the answer is no, just stop already as you aren't contributing to the solution. We are in the Age of Choice, so you must decide. #### Related Items [[Documentation]] [[The Human Condition]] [[Choice]] [[The Age of Choice]] [[Business]] [[Data]]