The Lone Technical Writer, aka Greta Boller, has just written an interesting article on why you shouldn't write everyday. She suggests that writing everyday can lead to burnout, a lack of joy and an inability to separate the good ideas from the bad ones, whilst stepping back can give you perspective on what you've written, a chance to learn more about your subject and the opportunity to remember why you love writing so much.
As a professional writer with a personal blog, my attitude is similar. I put a lot of thought and effort into the articles I write on Agile Documentation, and of the reasons that Greta gives for not writing everyday, the chance to learn more about the subjects I cover, is the prime reason I don't post more articles. However, some people feel torn between the horns of a dilemma when it comes to writing; on the one hand they feel they are unproductive or somehow failing if they don't write every day (or at least most days), but on the other hand writing everyday often has all of the drawbacks that Greta points out. I want to address some of the reasons for this and see if we can find a happy compromise.
To do this, let's look at why people feel bad if they don't write every day. I come from (the early days of) Generation X, the first generation for whom marriage, children, a steady career and retirement at 65 wasn't necessarily the best or most highly-regarded life choice. We in fact had many choices, and things in that area have only bloomed for the Generation Y and Millennials that have succeeded us as life's bright young things. The birth of the World Wide Web and the explosion of electronic and software engineering meant that we were the first generation to have mobile phones as essentially children - I got my first phone before I could vote - and the first generation of students who could research the vast majority of human knowledge at the click of a mouse. This has had many benefits, but one significant drawback is choice overload. We could see the breadth and depth of human knowledge stretched before us like a giant canvas, and so much of it looked interesting that it was, and is, hard to choose a single things to focus on for any long period of time.
This has got worse with the proliferation of interconnected digital media creation and storage devices. How many people want to take more photographs (and organise and curate the ones they've got on multiple devices and cloud storage accounts), find new music (and organise and curate the music they've got on multiple devices and cloud storage accounts), read more books (and organise and curate the ones they've got on multiple devices and cloud storage accounts) and watch more films, TV shows and documentaries (and organise and curate the ones they've got on multiple devices and cloud storage accounts)? People have a voracious appetite for both learning and expressing themselves, and with so many things to explore, and so many things to get good at, how do you choose? Whether it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something or 10 hours, there are still only so many hours in the day, and a finite amount of days in your life. It is no longer possible to be a renaissance man and know everything that man knows, like Da Vinci. And on top of that, if you want to express yourself and create something, that takes time to master as well. No-one picks up a piece of marble and a hammer and produces a Michaelangelo first time round, and no-one can write War and Peace from a standing start.
With this whirlwind of choices in mind, there are things like NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, where you write a certain number of words each day and at the end you have, if not something publishable, a serious chunk towards a publishable work. There are similar challenges with photography, film watching, novel reading, crafting, programming, language learning, and a whole host of other creative or learning pursuits. These challenges are geared as much as anything to people who want to be personally productive and make efficient use of their time to learn, understand and create as much as they can in the relatively short life span of a human. There are also MOOCs which can have tens of thousands of students, and these are incredibly popular, because the drive for learning seems to be universal. This drive for learning and achieving can create pressure and lead to a feeling of failure if you're not hyper-productive all the time. Basically, people want to be Tony Stark, or Elon Musk, or [pick your unbelievably productive hero here]. I won't go into the psychology of this - because it's presumably quite complex and highly contextual, and I'm not a psychologist - but I'm aware that it exists, and I'm aware that a lot of people suffer from this combination of intense drive and choice overload, which can often lead to feelings of failure. If you've read this far you're probably aware of it too.
Which brings us to writing every day. If you're struggling to write every day then NaNoWriMo won't change that. It might change it for a month, but when a family member gets ill, or you've got a ton of housework to do, or 8 weddings, a funeral, 3 christenings and 5 birthday celebrations to attend in the space of 4 months, the fact that you spent an hour a day for 30 days working on a novel back in November isn't going to help you. Life gets in the way. That's normal. Besides, at the end of that 4 month period you'll have a lot more to write about, simply because you haven't written much. I'm not knocking challenges like NaNoWriMo at all, because they're a great way of working on your self-discipline and churning out a lot of work, but that doesn't mean that you have to work like that every day of your life to be productive. Ah, but, I hear you say, the best way to Get Things Done is to make them a habit and do them for at least 10 minutes a day so that you can make progress! Yes, and if you're keeping on top of your email or rebuilding an engine that productivity and project management approach is very effective, but writing is not about being efficient or getting better. Allow me to expand on that.
There's an old saying that goes something like "If you want your child to become great at a sport, give them one ball", the idea being that you can be good at football and rugby and cricket, but you can only be great at one of them, and to that you need to specialise. Therefore, if your child spends time playing rugby, and only rugby, they'll have a chance to be a great rugby player because they'll get better and better the more they play rugby. As with rugby, the theory goes for some people, so with writing: Dedicate yourself to writing and you could be great at it. But are you REALLY writing in order to get better at writing? Or are you writing to express yourself, to have a creative outlet, to give yourself a sense of satisfaction, fulfilment and achievement? Becoming a better writer takes training, learning and effort. That doesn't mean writing everyday, it means practising writing regularly and with a purpose. That is not the same thing as writing a blog post or another chapter in your novel.
I doubt many people who blog or write books do it in order to get better at writing, except occasionally as a technical exercise for reasons of professional or academic advancement. Besides, the quality of practise is more important then quantity, so writing everyday might build discipline (which is good), but it won't automatically make you a better writer. The wheels will spin, but you won't necessarily be going anywhere.
You can apply the same logic to most creative pursuits such as music, photography, film-making, and so on. Doing nothing but taking photos might help you develop a rule of thumb for the types of photo you take, but it won't teach you the principles of effective composition that can be used in every situation. For that you need to learn about the theory and how to apply it. Otherwise you'll keep taking 1000 photos a day and getting 2 or 3 good ones, mainly by luck, whereas with a little theory you can take 500 a day and get 5 or 6 good ones, partly by understanding what makes a good photo. Writing is the same. Writing 50 pages a day of which you keep 2 is a worse use of your time than writing 10 pages of which you keep 9.
So, if I'm suggesting that writing every day isn't that worthwhile, how do you build the habit of writing and do it regularly? Well, as this is a blog about writing in agile environments, you will not be shocked to hear that an agile approach can help. Instead of focusing on how often you'll write, focus on what you'll produce instead. As an example, let's look at this blog. I know that, all things being equal, I can write 4 articles a month. So that's my velocity and sprint size right there - 4 articles a month. The obvious way to look at this would be to say, ok, why not 1 a week then? And the answer is equally obvious: Life gets in the way. If I'm having a busy week, or I'm ill, or work has gone crazy, I don't want this blog to suffer, but it can't be a higher priority than my work or my family, because I work to provide for my family and the blog is a personal project. So whilst the priority of this blog is higher on my personal backlog than, say, watching a new box set, it's not higher than paid work or my family. And work and families being what they are, the chances of a week going by without me having adequate time to write an article I'm happy with are relatively high.
But I also get weeks where everything is quiet, and that when happens I double down on the blog writing. The important boundary is that I've got one month to produce 4 articles. My month is a black box, and the customers - that's you, dear reader - don't care how I get the articles done within that month, you just care that they are done, and that the blog is regularly updated.
There are other benefits to an agile approach as well. I've got a minimum marketable subset of 3 articles a month. Less than 3 and the blog isn't updated enough for my liking, so I always do a minimum of 3 (unless circumstances are very unusual, in which case life comes first), but 4 is my goal. A month also allows me periods of time when I can accept that my writing mojo isn't high. If I had to write an article every week I'd have an opportunity to fail every 7 days, and sometimes my brain just doesn't work to that schedule so I'd be setting myself up for failure. But I love writing and I know that my mojo will come back, so I know I can achieve at least 3 articles a month almost every month with a relatively small amount of effort (because I love writing, so it's not a huge effort to write when my mojo is present and correct). A month is long enough for me to look back at my past articles and have some temporal distance to be honest with myself about what's worked and what hasn't and do a kind of personal retrospective. It also gives me enough time to discover interesting articles (like Greta's article that made me think about this) and do a bit of planning and grooming of future articles.
(The irony is that for the first time I've just missed my target. I've only posted 1 article in October 2015 because it's been the busiest month I've had for several years, but I still wrote 3 articles, including this one. It's just that I planned to post 2 articles on 31st October, but circumstances intervened and I'm posting them on 1st November instead. Despite this minor hiccup I still wrote the articles in October, which gives me confidence that the system can work even in the busiest months.)
I won't stretch the agile analogy too far, but the general concept of a sensible, repeating time period with a realistic goal at the end of it has worked very well for me, and I've started to apply variations of it to other things I want to work on. You can add goals to your monthly sprint, like "take photos of 3 sporting events", "bake 5 different cakes", "read one book", or whatever you want. Just make sure that the things in your sprint aren't the day-to-day of email management, budgeting, cleaning, or anything else that you can use a to-do list for.
Having tried the "build a habit by doing it everyday" approach, I can honestly say that an agile approach has made me much more productive and, crucially, stopped me burning out whilst still allowing me to build a habit. And if I want to write every day I can. I just don't have to. Like many people I want to read, learn, understand, create, experience and achieve many things and agile has so far proven to be the best tool to help me get there. Go on, give it a try. You might be surprised.
Sunday, 1 November 2015
Sunday, 18 October 2015
How To Work Out If A Company Is Right For You
The idea of working for one company from youth to retirement has become almost quaint, especially in the tech industry. For many people the only way to get a decent pay rise, or work on new things, or to move up the career ladder, is to move to a different job. And with globalisation following the low costs areas around the world as various currencies and tax regimes and legal situations fluctuate and evolve, even if you don't leave voluntarily there's a good chance at some point you'll leave involuntarily. To all intents and purposes, it is a certainty that if you've got more than 10 - 15 years before you can retire, you're going to move jobs. And moving jobs is a scary prospect, because change is often difficult and interviewing is scary and moving to a new company can be daunting.
I know, what a joyful opening, eh? But it's not all doom and gloom, because changing jobs is also refreshing, eye-opening and challenging, and you can get that pay rise or chance to work on new things or promotion that you want. So let's focus on the positives and assume that you've decided to take the plunge and look for a new job to make your life more satisfying. You can take or leave the job you're interviewing for. How can you find out whether the company you're interviewing with is right for you?
Let's get one thing clear: If what you want is money, and you're interviewing for a company that will pay double what any other company pays for equivalent roles, this article isn't for you. Take the job and spend the crap out of your new salary! (Also, do your brethren a solid and tell us who the company is and if they're hiring.) That's not to say that you shouldn't just check to make sure that the company isn't run by lizard people who are plotting to exterminate the human race - that'd probably stain the ol' resume when you move on - but generally speaking, if you want a honking great salary and can deal with the working conditions, just say yes, sign on the line and crack on.
Unfortunately, that kind of high-paying gig doesn't crop up often and anyway, people have needs that go above and beyond money. Sure, you need to pay your bills each month, but once you're earning a salary that enables you to do that then you've got to look at the other factors that make you happy. What are these factors? Let's hit the go-to diagram for amateur psychologists everywhere to find out:
This is Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, the much quoted, copied and discussed framework for understanding human motivation. We're not looking at the most basic motivations - the Physiological and Safety levels at the bottom of the pyramid - because if you need to change jobs to find food, shelter or safety then just take whatever you can. Rather, we're focusing on the top 3 levels: Love/Belonging, Esteem and Self-actualisation. To help us understand what they mean, here's an expanded version of the diagram:
For the purposes of finding a place that you actively want to work in, you need to understand what it is that you need and enjoy the most. That way you can ask the right kind of questions at interview to find out what the company attitude is in areas that are most important to you. Let's breakdown the 3 levels to see how they apply to your working environment.
Love/Belonging - This is about belonging to a tribe, being part of a group. For some people this is particularly important, for others it's not. If you're the kind of person who needs a sense of togetherness and community in your work place to be happy, then this is important to you. If you wonder how anyone could want to work somewhere without this, remember that it's not a binary choice. You can work for a company where you get on with your colleagues without wanting or needing close relationships; this doesn't mean you dislike the people you work with, it just means it's not that important to you whether you build close bonds or not.
Esteem - This is about doing a good job, being recognised for it, and recognising it in others. It's often the difference between doing a job that is seen as a necessary evil and doing a job that is seen as a positive benefit. Nobody wants to do a job for which their co-workers have disdain or contempt. The only thing worse than this is doing a job and feeling contempt for yourself for doing it. It's ok to want an occasional comment of appreciation, and it's ok to want other people to think that you do a good job of something that benefits the company. It doesn't matter if you're a cleaner (a job which is very under-appreciated - imagine how grim the bathrooms and kitchens in your office would be if no-one cleaned them for even a week) or a captain of industry, everyone likes to feel appreciated at least a bit.
Self-actualisation - This is about the fulfilment of potential and the need to achieve great (to you) things. It's common for this to be expressed in terms of wishing one could write a novel, or climb Everest, or go to the moon, but the intrinsic desire is more generic: to achieve something that is both rare and difficult, to have mastery of oneself and one's environment, to experience things which expand the boundaries of your world in a fundamental way. In the context of work this might be becoming a well-known guru in a particularly complex field, or building up your own successful company that disrupts the established order, or it could be something as simple as being the best you can be at what you do.
Don't think of these as stages through which you should progress, with each one representing more "success" than the previous stage. It's entirely possible for Person A to feel self-actualised by achieving things and living in a way which wouldn't satisfy Person B. Likewise Person A might think that Person B's desire to climb Everest seems unpleasant at best and their idea of hell at worst. It's all personal and all relative, especially as you can want or need any and all combinations of things from all 3 stages to be happy. Think of the stages as compartments on a serving tray, where you can pick what you want from any compartment.
With that in mind, here are some example questions which you can use to start finding out about your potential employer's attitude to what's important to you:
Love/Belonging:
Esteem:
Self-actualisation:
Of course there are many such questions, and these are only examples. They're also weighted towards documentation roles, so if that's not your area the Esteem questions in particular won't be much use to you. But in general terms, if you can work out what it is that you like and dislike about your current role, you'll be much better prepared to find out what your new company can offer to make your working life happier and more fulfilled.
I know, what a joyful opening, eh? But it's not all doom and gloom, because changing jobs is also refreshing, eye-opening and challenging, and you can get that pay rise or chance to work on new things or promotion that you want. So let's focus on the positives and assume that you've decided to take the plunge and look for a new job to make your life more satisfying. You can take or leave the job you're interviewing for. How can you find out whether the company you're interviewing with is right for you?
Let's get one thing clear: If what you want is money, and you're interviewing for a company that will pay double what any other company pays for equivalent roles, this article isn't for you. Take the job and spend the crap out of your new salary! (Also, do your brethren a solid and tell us who the company is and if they're hiring.) That's not to say that you shouldn't just check to make sure that the company isn't run by lizard people who are plotting to exterminate the human race - that'd probably stain the ol' resume when you move on - but generally speaking, if you want a honking great salary and can deal with the working conditions, just say yes, sign on the line and crack on.
Unfortunately, that kind of high-paying gig doesn't crop up often and anyway, people have needs that go above and beyond money. Sure, you need to pay your bills each month, but once you're earning a salary that enables you to do that then you've got to look at the other factors that make you happy. What are these factors? Let's hit the go-to diagram for amateur psychologists everywhere to find out:
Love/Belonging - This is about belonging to a tribe, being part of a group. For some people this is particularly important, for others it's not. If you're the kind of person who needs a sense of togetherness and community in your work place to be happy, then this is important to you. If you wonder how anyone could want to work somewhere without this, remember that it's not a binary choice. You can work for a company where you get on with your colleagues without wanting or needing close relationships; this doesn't mean you dislike the people you work with, it just means it's not that important to you whether you build close bonds or not.
Esteem - This is about doing a good job, being recognised for it, and recognising it in others. It's often the difference between doing a job that is seen as a necessary evil and doing a job that is seen as a positive benefit. Nobody wants to do a job for which their co-workers have disdain or contempt. The only thing worse than this is doing a job and feeling contempt for yourself for doing it. It's ok to want an occasional comment of appreciation, and it's ok to want other people to think that you do a good job of something that benefits the company. It doesn't matter if you're a cleaner (a job which is very under-appreciated - imagine how grim the bathrooms and kitchens in your office would be if no-one cleaned them for even a week) or a captain of industry, everyone likes to feel appreciated at least a bit.
Self-actualisation - This is about the fulfilment of potential and the need to achieve great (to you) things. It's common for this to be expressed in terms of wishing one could write a novel, or climb Everest, or go to the moon, but the intrinsic desire is more generic: to achieve something that is both rare and difficult, to have mastery of oneself and one's environment, to experience things which expand the boundaries of your world in a fundamental way. In the context of work this might be becoming a well-known guru in a particularly complex field, or building up your own successful company that disrupts the established order, or it could be something as simple as being the best you can be at what you do.
Don't think of these as stages through which you should progress, with each one representing more "success" than the previous stage. It's entirely possible for Person A to feel self-actualised by achieving things and living in a way which wouldn't satisfy Person B. Likewise Person A might think that Person B's desire to climb Everest seems unpleasant at best and their idea of hell at worst. It's all personal and all relative, especially as you can want or need any and all combinations of things from all 3 stages to be happy. Think of the stages as compartments on a serving tray, where you can pick what you want from any compartment.
With that in mind, here are some example questions which you can use to start finding out about your potential employer's attitude to what's important to you:
Love/Belonging:
- Does the company see people skills as more or less important than technical skills?
- Do you encourage cross-disciplinary working?
- Do the writers sit and work with the rest of the development staff?
- Are there flourishing clubs or activities, like a cycling club or poker school, where staff can spend time bonding?
Esteem:
- Does the company see documentation more as a necessary cost, or more as a value multiplier?
- Does the company operate a peer-review process for their documentation?
- Where do writers fit into your strategic plans for growth and success?
Self-actualisation:
- What is the yearly training budget, and how much time is allocated for training?
- Are there opportunities to move to different projects based on my interests and prior learning?
- Are your staff given autonomy and support or are they closely managed and monitored?
- Do you have a mentoring and/or coaching program for staff?
Of course there are many such questions, and these are only examples. They're also weighted towards documentation roles, so if that's not your area the Esteem questions in particular won't be much use to you. But in general terms, if you can work out what it is that you like and dislike about your current role, you'll be much better prepared to find out what your new company can offer to make your working life happier and more fulfilled.
Tuesday, 22 September 2015
Improving Documentation ROI: Part 7 - Personal Productivity
In Part 1 we looked at what ROI is, and how to calculate it.
In Part 2 we looked at the broad area of improving ROI by improving costs.
In Part 3 we looked in a bit more detail at direct costs, and specifically direct financial costs.
In Part 4 we looked at reducing direct time costs for other areas of the business.
In Part 5 we looked at creating a passive time income to save you time in the future.
In Part 6 we looked at ways to save time by using production line efficiency.
In part 7, we're going to look at ways to save time by improving your personal productivity.
As has been mentioned on many occasions in this series, time = money. When it comes to you, it's your time, which means that everything you do costs the company money, because they're paying for it. More than that, if you want to be a effective employee (or director, or company owner, or contractor, or hobbyist) you will need to have at least some basically efficient personal routines and habits to prevent you spending time on things which you either shouldn't or don't have to do. This is where the concept of personal productivity is useful.
Personal productivity means different things to different people but for our purposes, where we're looking at improving documentation ROI, it means using your time efficiently and effectively to maximise your writing time. The more time in the working day you can dedicate to researching, learning, writing, reviewing, proof reading, and all the other things that us writers have to do, the more documentation you can produce, and the higher the quality of that documentation.
With that in mind, there are 2 main areas that are worth investigating to see if you can save yourself time or make better use of non-writing time:
To that end, the specific skills to develop are:
And the general skills to develop are:
Depending on your current level of productivity and your work situation there will be other skills you need to develop, but these cover the majority of things which take away time and focus from the important work, and also the basics of getting that important work done. But bear in mind that getting a productivity system in place and working is like giving up smoking - you can use all the patches, sprays, and other aids you want, but ultimately willpower is required. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that the system is the important part, because it's not. You're the important part. The systems you develop to make yourself more productive are only useful if a) you use them, and b) they actually make you more productive. One of the easiest mistakes to make is to spend more time finessing the system than actually using it. This is particularly easy when you're something of a perfectionist or you have a tendency to get deep into the detail rather than the big picture. Keep the ultimate goal of increased productivity in mind. Tweaking your system to the nth degree is not productive.
If you've noticed that nowhere in those bullets points does it mention anything to do with writing skills, help authoring tools, or anything else that is specifically related to producing documentation, then congratulations and have a gold star on me. It's a fair question to ask: How can I talk about personal productivity as a writer without mentioning writing?
The equally fair answer is: Because I'm not talking about how to write productively (or well, or better, or more efficiently), I'm talking about how to consistently create and maintain the conditions you need to write. What, why, how and when you write is up to you, although of course I'm not averse to throwing my two penn'orth into that discussion. But that's for another time. This is about getting you set to write and that's enough for now.
Getting back to the point of this article: Calculating the ROI of personal productivity can be tricky, but it requires the same calculation as any other project: Work out the time it takes to build the systems you need, work out how much time they'll save you over a defined period, and plug the numbers into the equation. However, in this instance it might not be worth performing this exercise unless you need to justify what you're doing, because the return will be difficult to predict and you are unlikely to need budget approval for an activity that shouldn't require much if any outlay other than your own time. And, if you're serious about being more productive, a lot of the thought that needs to go into the system can be done on your own time.
I'll be covering all of these skills in a future series, but not as part of the series on ROI. If you want to crack on with improving your personal productivity, there is a slew of personal productivity information on the web. When I made that search, there were over 35.3 million results returned, so there's plenty of resources to help you. Good luck, and like all things in an agile world, don't be afraid to inspect and adapt to make the systems work for your personal system.
A more normal service will be resumed in part 8 of this series, where we'll switch from looking at saving costs to actually generating revenue.
In Part 2 we looked at the broad area of improving ROI by improving costs.
In Part 3 we looked in a bit more detail at direct costs, and specifically direct financial costs.
In Part 4 we looked at reducing direct time costs for other areas of the business.
In Part 5 we looked at creating a passive time income to save you time in the future.
In Part 6 we looked at ways to save time by using production line efficiency.
In part 7, we're going to look at ways to save time by improving your personal productivity.
As has been mentioned on many occasions in this series, time = money. When it comes to you, it's your time, which means that everything you do costs the company money, because they're paying for it. More than that, if you want to be a effective employee (or director, or company owner, or contractor, or hobbyist) you will need to have at least some basically efficient personal routines and habits to prevent you spending time on things which you either shouldn't or don't have to do. This is where the concept of personal productivity is useful.
Personal productivity means different things to different people but for our purposes, where we're looking at improving documentation ROI, it means using your time efficiently and effectively to maximise your writing time. The more time in the working day you can dedicate to researching, learning, writing, reviewing, proof reading, and all the other things that us writers have to do, the more documentation you can produce, and the higher the quality of that documentation.
With that in mind, there are 2 main areas that are worth investigating to see if you can save yourself time or make better use of non-writing time:
- Time Management - This has 2 core components: you, and other people. Managing your time well means cutting out interruptions, distractions, intrusive communication media and task switching as much as possible. All of these problems are caused either by you (especially distractions and task switching) or other people (especially interruptions and intrusive communication media). The goal of a time management system is to spend your time working on the most important priorities, not whatever is deemed most urgent by the other people interrupting you, and to spend that time in blocks large enough to allow you to focus properly.
- Task Management - This is the art of capturing, processing, doing and reviewing tasks, whilst using planning and prioritising to make sure you do the right tasks, at the right time, in the right order. Task management covers both repeating tasks (either regularly or irregularly) and one-off tasks. The difference between the repeating and one-off tasks is that whilst you can build an effective methodology for getting from start to finish that works for both types, you generally only have defined routines and habits for repeating tasks. This is for the obvious reason that by definition there can't be defined routines and habits for one-off tasks.
To that end, the specific skills to develop are:
- Communications management (emails, phone calls, IM, social media);
- Capturing and processing tasks into a system;
- Assertiveness;
- Effective communication;
- Saying No to people;
- Managing expectations;
- Prioritisation;
- Planning.
And the general skills to develop are:
- Understanding the power of building and maintaining routines and habits;
- Why building a system is useless unless it works and you use it;
- What motivates you to get things done;
- What motivates others to help you (or leave you alone);
- How to achieve a state of flow;
- How to not panic or have a breakdown.
Depending on your current level of productivity and your work situation there will be other skills you need to develop, but these cover the majority of things which take away time and focus from the important work, and also the basics of getting that important work done. But bear in mind that getting a productivity system in place and working is like giving up smoking - you can use all the patches, sprays, and other aids you want, but ultimately willpower is required. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that the system is the important part, because it's not. You're the important part. The systems you develop to make yourself more productive are only useful if a) you use them, and b) they actually make you more productive. One of the easiest mistakes to make is to spend more time finessing the system than actually using it. This is particularly easy when you're something of a perfectionist or you have a tendency to get deep into the detail rather than the big picture. Keep the ultimate goal of increased productivity in mind. Tweaking your system to the nth degree is not productive.
If you've noticed that nowhere in those bullets points does it mention anything to do with writing skills, help authoring tools, or anything else that is specifically related to producing documentation, then congratulations and have a gold star on me. It's a fair question to ask: How can I talk about personal productivity as a writer without mentioning writing?
The equally fair answer is: Because I'm not talking about how to write productively (or well, or better, or more efficiently), I'm talking about how to consistently create and maintain the conditions you need to write. What, why, how and when you write is up to you, although of course I'm not averse to throwing my two penn'orth into that discussion. But that's for another time. This is about getting you set to write and that's enough for now.
Getting back to the point of this article: Calculating the ROI of personal productivity can be tricky, but it requires the same calculation as any other project: Work out the time it takes to build the systems you need, work out how much time they'll save you over a defined period, and plug the numbers into the equation. However, in this instance it might not be worth performing this exercise unless you need to justify what you're doing, because the return will be difficult to predict and you are unlikely to need budget approval for an activity that shouldn't require much if any outlay other than your own time. And, if you're serious about being more productive, a lot of the thought that needs to go into the system can be done on your own time.
I'll be covering all of these skills in a future series, but not as part of the series on ROI. If you want to crack on with improving your personal productivity, there is a slew of personal productivity information on the web. When I made that search, there were over 35.3 million results returned, so there's plenty of resources to help you. Good luck, and like all things in an agile world, don't be afraid to inspect and adapt to make the systems work for your personal system.
A more normal service will be resumed in part 8 of this series, where we'll switch from looking at saving costs to actually generating revenue.
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