Document as you go

In my younger days working at McDonald's I was taught to clean as you go. The advice is deeper than you first think. It naturally breaks a large problem down into smaller problems and encourages you to tackle them immediately.

For some reason this approach has stuck with me, and I apply it to how I code, and how I document. For example when a colleague or report asks me a question. I can create a quick document to share the information and link that back to the colleague. I am no longer the bottle neck to that information and we have something to build upon and reference in the future.

To consider the cons before going all in on this approach is to make sure your docs are discoverable and easy to keep up to date. This will help with creating a single source of truth that isn't you, and not multiple documents that are out of date.

Writing documentation that is easy to keep up to date is it's own topic entirely. Keep things short and factual. Making sure things are discoverable is a harder topic to broach and it relies on your tools more than your technique mostly.

Ultimately documentation should make you redundant as far as that part of your job goes. Freeing up time to work on more interesting problems, rather than answering the same questions multiple times.