Ever since we started organizing how to hunt down mammoths and fend off sabertooth tigers, one of our biggest challenges has always been lack of documentation.

In today's digital environments, where we need to get more things done and our work is as interconnected as our social media, documentation is the key item to keep knowledge available and alive, and therefore, the key to sustained company growth and success. 

Yet most companies struggle with documentation. Missing documentation is such a common theme that if you google "documentation jokes" you'll find stuff like this this:

Ring a bell?

Despite companies sharing the headache of missing documentation across the board, our social media activity is full of text and (sometimes) detailed documentation of even the most trivial items:

 It's strange how we live in a world that is so connected that virtually everything of our lives can (and usually is) documented online; ironically, most of that documentation happens unconsciously, with endless amounts of creative power wasted on tweets, instagram posts and facebook updates that reach only our close followers (grandma and that aunt who treats every post as a private message). 

Imagine the world we would live in if we used such powers for good!

Yet when we talk about documentation, people freeze up. As if documentation at work was this bizarre monster that no one wants to mess with,  no one wants to even start it. 

If you look at online personalities, they too, have their entire life documented online, but they do it consciously. It took me a while to digest, I've been dealing with this idea for a while, but I finally accepted it for what it is and upon applying it at work and my personal projects, found it to be extremely useful:

Treat all knowledge as content and stream it through all possible mediums where it adds value.

When you do this, one bit of processed information (knowledge) can be presented through several different mediums and generate value in all of them. With thisA meeting minute can become an instructional video, a process, a blog article and a social media post. 

Narrowing this down to a practical example: 

Let's say you are working on a project and want to document it. 

The boring way to do it is to have one person grind on it for 8 hours and deliver a paper on time, yet hating all of you who put him/her to it. If you approach that same need with "knowledge is content" in mind you can:

1. Make an excel file where you can all add tweet sized explanations for the 5 W's: what where who what why. You can add information to this even when you're procrastinating and it helps you both vent and think about the project. This will capture your project's main information. 
2. Copy that excel sheet and remove the project's specific information, keep only what happened and the actions that were taken for decision making and responding to crisis. This becomes the workflow template for similar projects.
3. Take this last tab and give it to a designer to illustrate it. Congratulations, you now have an infographic you can post online.
4. Review the second excel tab and underline the key problem solvers that saved everyone's bacon, paste those on a new word file and write down a two paragraph description of why they saved your bacon. Add a header and introduction paragraph stating the emotional reaction to the issues you solved with those points (Eg. 5 tips to avoid overwhelm when a project gets derailed by upper management). Congratulations, you now have a blog article you can post online. 
5. Look at the original excel tab and underline the most infuriating moments during the project. These are the basis for the script of the tik tok video you'll use to gain followers and gain visibility.

Rinse, repeat, succeed. Take a selfie.

See how this works?

The key takeaway of this is that you can do the same things you're already doing during your day, just apply them to your daily work, and you'll be documenting everything you're doing like a pro with minimum loss of knowledge and maximum impact of your information.

Now that you know this secret that influencers use to post to 8 social media platforms on a daily basis, use this power wisely. Ideally to hunt mammoths.