Question: Why do I have such a hard time getting started?
Answer:
Procrastination, like phobia, is fear-based: a form of avoidant behavior. What are you avoiding? The fear of death, supposedly. I’m not sure how not cleaning the cat box is a fear of death. Maybe it’s the thought of having to face how awful a person you are for even letting the cat box get to the state that it’s in. Maybe failing to convert all your docs to DITA is the same as letting the cat box go too long.
Question: Our projects use clever code names before the official name is chosen, and they don’t have any relation to what the product is. How do I keep them all straight?
Answer:
You’ll just have to keep your own secret list and charge everyone a dollar to look at it.
Question: Is anyone using structured tools such as FrameMaker anymore? What is this “lightweight” stuff I keep hearing about?
Answer:
The eternal conflict between permanence and expediency is another effect of the speeded-up world we live in, where things that used to take hours or days can now be done on your smart phone in 5 seconds or less. Lightweight is great as long as you have a way to tell when it’s no longer enough, and a plan for what to do when that critical mass is reached.
Question: Is it just me, or is there too much going on?
Answer:
I have to vent about the modern high-tech, startup expectation that everyone can wear many hats and stay connected to the team 24-7 via chat, texting, Skype, Google Docs. There are so many interruptions that it’s impossible to focus on any one task for more than 5 minutes at a time.
Question: How polished-looking does my first draft need to be?
Answer:
This is an important question, now that documentation has not only moved online, but has migrated into Wiki-like systems where you can have miles of empty placeholder topics, maybe 10 of which are actually populated – and it’s all in your live system because it’s always a work in progress. There’s no way a user can tell from the listings which topics actually have data in them.
Question: Should I close my Wells Fargo bank account?
Answer:
Not necessarily. That’s like being a deer covered in ticks and you think removing ONE tick is going to make you healthy.
Question: I need a time machine to go backwards 2 days in order to reflect last-minute decisions.
Answer:
People just want to wait until the past possible second to commit to a decision, but then, they want everything else to fall into place instantaneously to reflect it. The result is that vanishing slice of time that you’ll have to reflect all these decisions in the documentation.
Question: Isn’t there a way to set up my docs so that each piece of information appears in only one place?
Answer:
Theoretically yes, if you don’t mind a cure that is worse than the disease.
Question: For the past several weeks, I’ve been having nightmares about my phone acting crazy. Should I see a shrink or an exorcist?
Answer:
I would try to enjoy these nightmares for their colorful and bizarre content, and not worry too much. These are anxiety dreams, which are more typically expressed as “examination dreams” where you’re suddenly back in high school taking that old trigonometry exam all over again – while naked. Anxiety is normal, and is your brain’s way of working things out.
Question: How do I know if those dates are real?
Answer: If the prototype hardware part has been ordered, it’s real. Otherwise, it’s not.
Art Before Science 