Question: Every time I start a project it always seems so straightforward, and then a week later it’s a hot mess. What am I doing wrong?

Answer:
Ahaha, there’s nothing wrong with you, this always happens. Projects are like rocks. They look smooth and clean on the surface until you pick them up and see what’s living underneath. As a tech writer your job is to document the worms in a way that makes them look like something other than what they are.

It just doesn’t look good to say “Pick up the worms in any order, they’re squishy and gross so use gloves.” That does not reflect well on the product or on you. But, coming up with appropriate phraseology is not a simple task. That’s why they pay us the big bucks, right?

“Using digital tools and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), remove each annelid from the stack,” is how I might re-word that last sentence. No one will even know what it means and it’s still true enough, for some values of “true”.