Dear Reader,

You may be familiar with the acronym RTFM. If you are not, let me point you to the relevant page of the Urban Dictionary: Read The Fucking Manual!

More than being just a nerdish way to annoy lazy people, you can use it as a reminder to try to solve a problem/search for an answer by yourself before begging for help. There is a helluva lot of knowledge out there, we humans have amassed a tremendous amount of know-how and facts! Have you ever noticed those strange moments when, during a conversation, everybody is struggling to remember something, and no one pops out his fancy 300+ euros phone to look up on the internet? What a waste of time and resources! And I don’t have to tell you about those time when you get asked for a solution that would have taken the asker less than three minutes to solve by himself.

Before I get too paternalistic, you may want to know what I’m planning to add to the pile of human knowledge mentioned above with this post, since you already know all that.

Fair question.

I want to add four letters (Oh f..k! Another four letters word, s..t!). They are:

WTFM

…

(Suspense… Stop reading and try solving it!)

…

WRITE The F..king Manual!

The WTFM mantra helps me remembering a few fundamental tenets of human civilisation and psychology:

  1. Knowledge can be transferred orally, but History began with the written word. That was when we switched gear as a race
  2. If you need to ask a qualified individual for a how-to, and said person is not around, it is highly likely that you will instead resort to improvisation and trial-and-error, wasting time and possibly introducing errors
  3. “If there is no certain written source about a piece of information, errors and misinformation tend to spread at an increasing rate.” – Albert Einstein, 1865.
  4. The human psyche has a strong bias toward estimating the probability of being able to recover in the future a piece of information we have just been exposed to. That is one reason why we overlook taking written notes, guessing we will remember everything with ease in the future (I suspect this is a consequence of the availability heuristic, and knowing this makes me love Evernote even more)

I no longer regard a project done until I have written the minimum documentation for it.

I no longer accept a complex task until I have written down the significant details.

At work I encourage my colleagues to write down what they did to solve a problem and put it in a shared file: it does not matter the form, as long as we gain back time. There is nothing worse than having form-perfect documentation that fails to deliver the right content.

Currently, I’m begging my mom, who retired in March, to write down the recipes she used at her cake shop. She remembers all of them now but in six months? In a year?

If you are not convinced yet, try to google “how to take note course” and look and the number of results.

Until next time, should I be writing a manual on how to write manuals?

(Special Editor: V.P.)