I had to put together some instructions for our secretary to enter a considerable amount of data into a series of web-based forms. My first impulse was to create a series of screen shots, dump them into Microsoft OneNote and annotate the screen shots with the instructions. (I’ve done that in the past for a similar type of task.)
However, I caught myself, picked up a pencil and some scratch paper, scribbled out the instructions, and wrote the date at the bottom of the page. I took the paper upstairs to our secretary, and she was able to follow the instructions perfectly. The tech-heavy solution would have generated some glamorous pictures. But it would have used up a lot more time and paper to accomplish the same job. It would likely have been more difficult to follow as the instructions would have been spread across several pages as well. I’m finally learning that, particularly when delegating, it’s important to keep things as simple as possible.
