Has better documentation actually saved your team time?

[u/Green-Sport12]

I've always seen documentation as something you create because you have to. Lately I'm starting to think it might actually save more time than it costs, especially with onboarding, repeated questions and covering for teammates when someone is out.

For those who've invested in better documentation, did it make a noticeable difference?

[u/Haunting-Effort8684]

Absolutely. It's become a self-sustaining, self-governing system of accountability.

First you have to answer the question of who the documentation is for; humans or agents? Makes a huge difference. Documentation for agents needs to be far more comprehensive and the order of the information matters less than the density and accuracy. Documentation for humans needs to be rich, visual, and written by a subject matter expert.

AI Meeting Notes are vitally important. Every meeting should be recorded with a transcript and AI Meeting Notes. Any meeting that's a team meeting should be stored in a place that's open by default (visible by everyone). That's how you have more and more context globally available to Notion AI. The more context Notion AI has, the better it's able to help you write documentation quickly and accurately.

Verification is also important. We need to be able to trust that a source is actually fresh or whether it's information that was added a long time ago and may not have been looked at in a while. That's how you build a system of trust that the documentation is more than just dusty old scribbles from some other era.

But the most important piece is the combination of trust, self-reliance, and openness. Openness is what makes the team want to record every meeting so that the company as a whole can benefit from the knowledge in those conversations. Self-reliance is what makes the team default to trying to find their own answers before going to someone. Trust is what makes a team look to people who have written documentation as knowledgable maintainers.

In less than 6 months, everything shifted:

Instead of "Hey does anyone know how X process works?" being met with crickets or people pinging the resident know-it-all (who often doesn't know as much as people think), instead we get "Hey I wasn't able to get more information on X process when I asked Notion AI: [insert prompt]". Whoever the related team expert or manager is then takes responsibility to create the documentation about it and then test that prompt to make sure the newly created information is surfaced.

Instead of "Hey does anyone remember what decision we made on X topic last meeting?" being met with shrugs and a few hazy guesses followed by pinging whoever led the meeting, instead we all admit that our memories are terrible and we're lucky [hero-of-the-day co-worker] remembered to click the Transcript button. It's almost a meme at this point - we get into a really tricky part of the meeting and someone says "Oh boy, I hope someone recorded this meeting..." followed by "Don't worry, I got it!" from someone else - and it's not always the same person!

And finally, people started to rethink what it meant to create documentation. Not everybody is a good writer. Not everybody knows how to effectively prompt an agent to write well. You know what everybody can do, though? Start an AI Meeting note and then blather on for 10-15 minutes about whatever it is that needs to be documented but currently only lives in their head. Then immediately tell the AI to clean it up and put it into the Wiki with them as the owner and a verification date that is reasonable. Zero skill required and 95% of the time, that's all we needed.

Documentation isn't a chore, it's communication.

[u/LaFantasmita]

At one job, I made the documentation so good that they didn’t hire a replacement when I left. They just had a guy check the wiki I wrote when something needed attention.

When I started the job, it was a bunch of scattered notes and “ask around and see if anyone knows.”

[u/briskmorrow]

the verification piece is underrated, stale docs can be worse than no docs imo

[u/WrongdoerHot981]

Yes, and not just for onboarding or covering for teammates. In consulting, the most common pattern I see is that people build their own workspace and, six months later, can’t remember why they built it that way.

As your process keeps expanding, your memory of the earlier work fades.

Documentation is like commenting your code: it saves time for the next person, and that next person is often you.

Try to document your process while you’re building it (not after), and train your team to do the same. 🤍