If you need to improve your documentation process, you don’t need to spend more time on it. You need to see what you can’t see when you are in the midst of it. It’s the little things, like a slightly different name, or the placement in a slightly different place, or the formatting being off by a little, that you don’t notice because it looks normal to you. So feedback is only useful if it allows you to see what you are missing and translate that into a simple change that you can make right now.
So first, grab a few documents that you’ve created recently. Don’t look at all of them, just a few that have gone all the way through the process. Now look at them as if you were looking at them for the first time. Can you tell what they are about from the name? Can you tell where they are kept? Does the format make sense to you? Simply changing your context can help you see what you are missing.
Another trick is to pull up two similar documents that you created on different days. Put them side by side and compare the names, format and location. Any differences you see are important, even if they seem minor, because that means you weren’t consistent. You don’t need to judge whether the outcome is good or bad, you just need to recognize why those differences happened.
The biggest problem with trying to use feedback to improve a process is that you try to use it to evaluate the overall quality, instead of driving a specific change. You recognize that you don’t like how something feels, but you can’t articulate what to do about it. So you need to constrain yourself to a single thing at a time. For example, you realize that your file names are not consistent, so you define a standard for file names and then apply it to both documents. Then you can use that new standard going forward.
To create a habit, you need to allocate a small amount of time on a regular basis to simply review and refine your process. I suggest 15 minutes. In that fifteen minutes, you pull up a few documents, recognize one thing you can improve and make that improvement. A little practice every day goes a long way toward making a process hum.
If you find yourself uncertain, drill down into the exact point where you make a decision. Perhaps you are deciding on a file name, or where to keep it, or whether the document is complete. Rather than leaving it open, make a rule for that situation and test it on your next few documents. Feedback isn’t useful unless it drives action in the moment.