I fooled myself once again in thinking that I can remember stuff. There’s no way that I remember how to set up all my AWS containers on my side project after half a year. There’s also no way that I even remember any of my algorithms right two weeks after implementing them.

Yet, time over time I trick myself in overestimating my knowledge and use some kind of recency bias to believe that I do not need to document what I’m doing. A current example of this is getting into QMK during last year’s Christmas holiday. I started building a custom keyboard layout and used QMK firmware. Since I haven’t continued on with the project since then I now have to go through a lot of introduction and Getting Started documentation to get where I left of.

This takes time and spending this time is the worst as I learn something what I already knew before. This Relearning process takes more time than writing my own, custom documentation that is tailored to my needs. Also, the relearning phase stops me to get right into it. It’s a demotivating mountain I have to climb again before I can continue where I left off and what I like. The third obstacle in the way is not knowing where I exactly stopped. I’ll definitely get my head around the problems and open To-dos. However, just knowing up front what to look for is a great starting point.

The last point also reminds me of people who do the heavy thinking during the day and leave the workplace with an easy task open for the next day. The next morning, they start by doing this easy task, getting into whatever they were doing the day before without any headaches.

For me, I have to remind myself to write documentation and personal notes on almost any project, task and how to-guides¹. I do not need to think that I can remember any of what I do.