Documentation Tax
05-sep-2026
Documentation Tax is the cost of preserving so much that maintaining the record becomes its own work.
I have seen documentation become useless even when the information itself was preserved.
The problem was retrieval and linkage.
In good jest, I documented what I was doing everywhere — Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and other places. The information existed, but it was scattered. Recovering it later meant first finding the pieces and then reconstructing how they related to each other.
That creates another kind of maintenance burden.
It is not only the effort of writing things down. It is the effort of maintaining a clean flow between them. Being dependent on third-party publishing tools and platforms adds another bottleneck because the thread gets divided across different places.
Documentation becomes useful to me when there is a steady thread of information flow.
That is part of what I want from a wiki. I should be able to trace backwards, understand how I arrived at an idea, and then continue moving forward from it.
When that continuity exists, documentation does not feel like maintaining a record for its own sake. It helps me stay in the flow and build on ideas and curiosity.
Everything else is downstream.
I still don't know exactly where the useful point between too little preservation and too much preservation lies.
Related ideas
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Reconstruction Tax — the opposite failure: too little preservation.
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Builder's Journal — a lighter reflection layer that preserves meaning without turning everything into documentation.