As a new tech support person, one the difficult things for me to learn was what to document. If you document everything, you’ll quickly get buried in the process. You’ll spend your day documenting instead of fixing things. If you document too little, you won’t be able to look up the resolution to a problem you solved six months ago so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel again.

Here is my suggestion:

Think about the question you are being asked or the problem you are solving. If you can solve the problem in a minute or less, it is probably unneccessary to document it. For example, if a user stops me in the hall and says, “How do you make text bold in Microsoft Word?” I would simply tell the user how to do it and then forget about. I wouldn’t run right back to my desk and document that I had been asked that question.

If the problem takes between 1 minute and 10 minutes to solve, it might be worth documenting it. It will depend on the problem, the user, and the solution. I hate to be this vague, but it is simply a judgement call.

If it takes you more than 10 minutes to solve it, you should definitely document it. You’ll want a record of it so if you have to do it again, you’ll remember what you did and so when someone asks you why it is taking so long to finish another task you needed to do, you can say, “Here! I was working on this!”

In my next post, I’ll tell you what we use to do our documentation.

–Pete