Document Everything!

[#1]

This is one of the most powerful habits I wish remote teams adopted more.

Documenting everything.

Not because you love writing things down for the sake of it.

But because clear, accessible documentation is what makes async work.

When decisions live in your head (or in some Slack Channel), people have to ask to catch up.

Which means more meetings. More repeating. More “Can you remind me where that stands?”

Better documentation means…

→ Everyone has the context they need
→ Teams move faster without waiting on a status update
→ Progress doesn’t pause when one person is offline

Async doesn’t mean you lose visibility. It means you gain clarity—without the meeting.

Because if your documentation does the talking, your team can get back to building.

[Anne Saunders]

I'm a passionate believer in documentation. (My office door has a cute little, "But did you document it?" sign!)

I've increasingly run into a behavioral snag which is different teams grabbing a copy of an SOP for their space (rather than linking out to the original) or creating a new SOP that only applies to their team (even though it's 80% the base SOP).

The downside is that when I update an existing SOP, I don't necessarily know to look for their copy or carve-outs, so I don't include them in my updates, and then users get upset when I tell them they're out of order on something, because the base SOP doesn't respect their (valid) carve-outs and they were just following their team's documentation.

How do you ensure a single source of truth?