Oh Dear God
I have a longstanding rant about documentation; specifically that it should be done.
What is apparently not as obvious to everyone else as it is to me is what "documentation" entails, because after a two month absence I've come back to find everything a hodge-podge. None of it is "wrong", exactly, but it's clear that my habits of putting in "extra" information have not been picked up by... roughly anyone else.
A while back, allanh made a post about how when he was ill and had particularly bad memory problems, he used to treat everything he did as "leaving notes to his future self". I thought it was an excellent practice, and since then I've taken to putting not just "flight to California" in my calendar, but "American Flight 123 DTW to SJC via DFW lands at 9:55pm" in my calendar (with the start date being the takeoff time; if it's odd, I'll note that as well), and been happier for it, especially now that I own a Blackberry that syncs to the same calendar. It certainly makes it easier to tell someone when to pick me up, or when I'll be at Enterprise renting a car, or whether I'll be there in time for dinner.
What I hadn't fully realized was that I already did that to a lesser degree: when I pay commissions, I don't lump them all into one "Sales:Commissions Paid" entry in QuickBooks, but rather I split them off into one line per month (all of which are still "Sales:Commissions Paid") and note which month it is, which matches up with a spreadsheet, which cross-references the check number within it. For the salesperson it's still one check, and at the end of the year it's still one category in the P&L statement, but day-to-day if you want to go back and figure out what's been paid and what hasn't, it's simple. Similarly, when I pay a consultant, I don't just put "22 hours" in the memo field, I put "22 hours 4/10 - 4/25" so that I can match it up with an email containing the hours I'm paying for.
This did not happen while I was gone, and now I'm staring at a QuickBooks file that I have no idea how things got to where they are. I like it not.
While my first priority is to get it back to something I can deal with, I have determined that if this system is going to work at all, I'm going to need to document not just how I do things, but why I do them that way. Yay, more work.
What is apparently not as obvious to everyone else as it is to me is what "documentation" entails, because after a two month absence I've come back to find everything a hodge-podge. None of it is "wrong", exactly, but it's clear that my habits of putting in "extra" information have not been picked up by... roughly anyone else.
A while back, allanh made a post about how when he was ill and had particularly bad memory problems, he used to treat everything he did as "leaving notes to his future self". I thought it was an excellent practice, and since then I've taken to putting not just "flight to California" in my calendar, but "American Flight 123 DTW to SJC via DFW lands at 9:55pm" in my calendar (with the start date being the takeoff time; if it's odd, I'll note that as well), and been happier for it, especially now that I own a Blackberry that syncs to the same calendar. It certainly makes it easier to tell someone when to pick me up, or when I'll be at Enterprise renting a car, or whether I'll be there in time for dinner.
What I hadn't fully realized was that I already did that to a lesser degree: when I pay commissions, I don't lump them all into one "Sales:Commissions Paid" entry in QuickBooks, but rather I split them off into one line per month (all of which are still "Sales:Commissions Paid") and note which month it is, which matches up with a spreadsheet, which cross-references the check number within it. For the salesperson it's still one check, and at the end of the year it's still one category in the P&L statement, but day-to-day if you want to go back and figure out what's been paid and what hasn't, it's simple. Similarly, when I pay a consultant, I don't just put "22 hours" in the memo field, I put "22 hours 4/10 - 4/25" so that I can match it up with an email containing the hours I'm paying for.
This did not happen while I was gone, and now I'm staring at a QuickBooks file that I have no idea how things got to where they are. I like it not.
While my first priority is to get it back to something I can deal with, I have determined that if this system is going to work at all, I'm going to need to document not just how I do things, but why I do them that way. Yay, more work.