I’ve been writing developer documentation for 20 years now, 11 of those years at Mozilla. For most of those years, documentation work was largely unmanaged. That is to say, we had management, and we had goals, but how we reached those goals was entirely up to us. This worked well for me in particular. My brain is like a simple maze bot in some respects, following all the left turns until it reaches a dead end, then backing up to where it made the last turn and taking the next path to the right, and repeating until the goal has been reached.

This is how I wrote for a good 14 or 15 years of my career. I’d start writing about a topic, linking to APIs, functions, other guides and tutorials, and so forth along the way—whether they already existed or not. Then I’d go back through the page and click the first link on the page I just created, and I’d make sure that that page was solid. Any material on that page that needed to be fixed for my new work to be 100% understood, I’d update. If there were any broken links, I’d fix them, creating and writing new pages as needed, and so forth.

How my mind wants to do it

Let’s imagine that the standards gurus have spoken and have decided to add to a new <dial> element to HTML, providing support for creating knobs and speedometer-style feedback displays. My job is to document this element.

I start by creating the main article in the HTML reference for <dial >, and I write that material, starting with a summary (which may include references to <progress> , <input> , and other elements and pages). It may also include links to articles I plan to create, such as “Using dial elements” and “Displaying information in HTML” as well as articles on forms.

As I continue, I may wind up with links to subpages which need to be created; I’ll also wind up with a link to the documentation for the HTMLDialElement interface, which obviously hasn’t been written yet. I also will have links to subpages of that, as well as perhaps for other elements’ attributes and methods.

Having finished the document for <dial> , I save it, review it and clean it up, then I start following all the links on the page. Any links that take me to a page that needs to be written, I write it. Any links that take me to a page that needs content added because of the new element, I expand them. Any links that take me to a page that is just horribly unusably bad, I update or rewrite as needed. And I continue to follow those left-hand turns, writing or updating article after article, until eventually I wind up back where I started.

If one of those pages is missing an example, odds are good it’ll be hard to resist creating one, although if it will take more than a few minutes, this is where I’m likely to reluctantly flag it for someone else to do later, unless it’s really interesting and I am just that intrigued.

By the time I’m done documenting <dial> , I may also have updated badly out of date documentation for three other elements and their interfaces, written pages about how to decide on the best way to represent your data, added documentation for another undocumented element that has nothing to do with anything but it was a dead link I saw along the way, updated another element’s documentation because that page was where I happened to go to look at the correct way to structure something, and I saw it had layout problems…

You get the idea.

How I have to do it now

Unfortunately, I can’t realistically do that anymore. We have adopted a system of sprints with planned work for each sprint. Failing to complete the work in the expected amount of time tends to get you dirty looks from more and more people the longer it goes on. Even though I’m getting a ton accomplished, it doesn’t count if it’s not on the sprint plan.

So I try to force myself to work on only the stuff directly related to the sprint we’re doing. But sometimes the line is hard to find. If I add documentation for an interface, but the documentation for its parent interface is terrible, it seems to me that updating that parent interface is a fairly obvious part of my job for the sprint. But it wasn’t budgeted into the time available, so if I do it, I’m not going to finish in time.

The conundrum

That leaves me in a bind: do strictly what I’m supposed to do, leaving behind docs that are only partly usable, or follow at least some of those links into pages that need help before the new content is truly usable and “complete,” but risk missing my expected schedule.

I almost always choose the latter, going in knowing I’m going to be late because of it. I try to control my tendency to keep making left turns, but sometimes I lose myself in the work and write stuff I am not expected to be doing right now.

Worse, though, is that the effort of restraining myself to just writing what’s expected is unnatural to me. My brain rebels a bit, and I’m quite sure my overall throughput is somewhat lower because of it. As a result: a less enjoyable writing experience for me, less overall content created, and unmet goals.

I wonder, sometimes, how my work results would look if I were able to cut loose and just go again. I know I have other issues slowing me down (see my earlier blog post Peripheral neuropathy and me), but I can’t help wondering if I could be more productive by working how I think, instead of doing what doesn’t come naturally: work on a single thing from A to Z without any deviation at all for any reason.

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