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# Leave a paper trail
- URL: https://www.petercai.com/leave-a-paper-trail/
- Published: 2024-09-03T12:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2024-09-03T12:00:00.000Z
- Description: Writing things down is an underutilized super power.
- Author: Peter Cai
- Tags: #Import 2026-08-11 22:26

One thing I always value at work is "writing culture." A couple reasons it has been extraordinarily valuable to me:

1. **Documentation as a historical reference.** The most straightforward use of documentation is to create a historical record: Writing down decisions and the "why" behind them helps you and people who will come after you understand the context of a decision. Countless times this has helped us avoid repeating mistakes or making suboptimal decisions - it's very easy to glance at some document and say "oh, we already thought of solution B2, and didn't pursue it because of X, Y, and Z."
2. **Documentation as a shaping tool.** Writing down an idea forces the writer to be more precise and clear - it's much more obvious if the ideas are not clearly organized and coherent. I find the actual process of writing and editing to result in better decisions, as it forces me to reason through things more thoroughly.
3. **Documentation as a reflection tool.** Most decisions are often made with incomplete information, and it's easy to forget the context in which they were made. Writing down what we decided and why helps us reflect on decisions later and review the process and outcome of the decision. What did we know at the time? What did we fail to anticipate? What factors did we overlook or overemphasize in hindsight? This is very hard to do without a written record - in my experience, our memories are unreliable and very quickly we begin to conflate what we knew at the time and what we learned after the fact.
4. **Documentation as a form of communication.** As teams grow beyond what can comfortably fit in a room, it gets harder to communicate important ideas without losing fidelity. Writing down ideas and decisions "freezes" them so they don't unintentially mutate as the ideas are passed around in a game of "telephone." It's often said that the bigger the audience, the more important it is that your idea is simple and straightforward. But this often isn't enough - operationally, different people need different nuance! Writing lets you add nuance with less risk that your core idea will be lost in noise.
5. **Documentation as a culture waypoint.** Since culture is what you do, you can nudge culture by simply writing down what you do. Checklists and procedures for common tasks that don't change often provide a lot of value as they're write-once and read many times. And documenting decisions driven by your values and principles can help reinforce those values and principles.

Anyways. This is why I always advocate for leaving a paper trail. If you say it twice, write it down.