Document your workflows

The idea

An undocumented workflow lives only in your head and degrades over time.

In 2001, Peter Pronovost, a critical care specialist at Johns Hopkins, created a five-step checklist for inserting central venous catheters. The steps were basic: wash hands, drape the patient, clean the skin with chlorhexidine, avoid the femoral site when possible, remove the catheter when it is no longer needed. Every ICU doctor already knew these steps. They were taught in medical school, reinforced in residency, and practiced thousands of times.

An example

You publish a newsletter every Thursday. Some weeks it takes 90 minutes, other weeks it takes four hours. You cannot figure out why. When you finally write down every step — research, outline, draft, edit, format, schedule, promote — you discover the variance comes from one step: you sometimes research and outline simultaneously, which produces false starts. The documentation did not change the workflow. It revealed the workflow you actually have, which turned out to be different from the one you thought you had.

Where it goes wrong

Treating documentation as a one-time project rather than a living artifact. You write down your morning routine, feel organized, then never update it. Six months later the document describes a workflow you abandoned in March. The failure is not in the initial capture — it is in assuming documentation is a deliverable instead of an instrument you keep in tune.

Make it stick

Over the next 48 hours, document three workflows: one personal, one professional, one creative. Use numbered steps. Mark any step where you make a judgment call with a decision diamond — a note that says 'decide: X or Y based on Z.' These three documents become your workflow library seed. You will iterate on them, but they must exist before iteration is possible.