Most of what I've documented was for me

I write grocery lists I never bring to the store. By the time I'm done writing one, I already know what's on it — the list did its job before I ever picked it up.

I think I've been doing the same thing at work for years, except I called it a process document. I'd sit down to write an SOP because something had gone wrong, work through every step, cover every edge case I could think of — and by the end I understood the process cold. Then I'd publish it to the team and move on, assuming the understanding transferred with the document. It mostly didn't. People kept doing the thing the way they'd always done it, and I'd get annoyed that they hadn't read it.

That annoyance is the unflattering part. I didn't ask whether the document was written for them. It was written for me, to think through a problem, and I dressed it up afterward as something instructional. Different job. In the Marine Corps, a technical order got read because you signed your name next to a torque value and the engine either held or it didn't. There was no ambiguity about who it was for. Most of what I've written since has had no equivalent stakes and no equivalent reader in mind — I was the audience the whole time, I just didn't say so.

I still write things this way. I don't think I should stop — working through a problem on paper is genuinely how I solve it. What I've gotten better at, and only partly, is noticing afterward whether what I produced needs a second pass aimed at an actual reader, or whether it should just stay a note to myself and I should tell people the real process some other way — out loud, in the room, repeated until it sticks. I'm not confident I can tell which is which before I've already written the wrong one.

If you run a team that documents everything and people actually use it, I'd like to know what's different about how you write it, or who you're picturing when you sit down to write it.

If your documentation actually gets read, what do you do differently when you're writing it?