The first step to offloading a task is writing down how to complete it. Once the process is typed into a lean text file or wiki page, it can be learned by another human. This helps your team, but what's in it for you?
The most selfish programmers probably want to free up their time to focus on more interesting work instead of repetitive processes and maintenance. Therefore, the most selfish programmers should love writing documentation. These types of tasks are somewhat unavoidable, so committing to writing documentation will help you push it over to your teammates.
Write to free yourself of your laundry list of recurring tasks. It's the first step to someone else to be able to step in for you or to delegate to someone else completely. On the plus side, you'll be less reliant on your meaty human brain to remember how to do it. Be selfish, take time to write down how to do your work!
When assessing your environment, problem or your goal, meticulously scout the tools at your disposal. When you're learning a new job, a new project or a programming language's tools for example, it pays to have a grasp of your options. Researching what documentation, guides, tools or libraries are at your disposal will help you accomplish your goal. That sounds obvious but here's what I mean.
Seek out resources. Bookmark links and support info in an Excel spreadsheet with a handful of columns, for example.
Soon, you'll amass a collection tools and guides to get things done. Most companies or products have "resource centers",
mountains of internal documentation, tools and blogs. At many organizations, people have likely made tools for something
they needed in the past then moved on. Often these tools can be leveraged for anyone who cares enough to seek out,
read about and learn how to use them. Dig for these tools too. Find resources by googling products you use.
Subscribe to their status pages. Look for other tools that may help you in a pinch
like GoToWebinar's system check to help someone figure out what's wrong
with their browser. I love these types of browser-based troubleshooting software. These are ways to gain a better understanding of technologies
that might affect or improve your productivity or day to day goals.
I think of "resource scoping" as crawling these types of resources for every tool, guide and support contact that might good to know. The effort you put in to scope available resources is worth the time spent. Check out the "resource scoping"
I did in this post I wrote focused on tools for writers!
