I’ve learned a ton in my new job. I knew next to nothing about venture capital when I joined, and had last done full-stack work almost 4 years ago, which is all hopelessly out of date now. As a result I’ve spent hours every week poring over articles and documentation, trying to clean every last scrap of knowledge that I can.

Unsurprisingly, not every tidbit is as useful as others. Some pieces yield nearly instant understanding while others are still intractably after the fifth reading. This tends to vary roughly in lock-step with the complexity of the information. But occassionaly an author encapsulates and distills a concept so accurately that the intricate becomes simply.

Having written a fair bit of documentation myself, I know how hard this is to accomplish. In many ways it’s a challenge akin to editing. The writer must be an expert on the subject matter to ensure the accuracy of the information, but must also be able to see the problem without any built-up context to ensure that outsiders can understand it. Thus as the topic becomes more complex, the author must be further divorced from a beginner and less able to view the information through that lens.

This means the ideal time to create documentation would be immediately after acquiring knowledge of it. When any initial confusions are still at the forefront of your memory. But I tend to be far more likely to want to apply the new knowledge rather than to write it out.

Ingesting massive tracts of new information has proved to be a decent forcing mechanism to avoid this in my new role. I’m learning so many new things a day that not everything can make it to my long term memory. So if I don’t write something down straight away I’m likely to lose it. I’m not sure how long this will remain true though. So I’m hoping that by the time this frantic phase ends I will have made a habit of it.