Work in progress

I miss seeing unfinished docs. Placeholder text, headings with no body, unanswered questions, bullet point lists that haven’t been fleshed out. Getting a glimpse into the thought process, the prioritisation. What’s important and what’s difficult.

Docs that were never really finished. They were living, they bore the imprint of previous meetings, betrayed changes in ways of thinking and exposed when new ideas were shared. Notes pasted in a different font, the fingerprints of time and thinking, of attention.

The craft was always evident. Craft is a process, creation through struggle, thought, disagreement, even with oneself. It provides texture to a document, an extra dimension of meaning.

Now everything is always complete. The docs are finished, yet so much is missing.

And it wasn’t just the doc itself: even watching a doc being edited, you could learn so much about how someone is thinking. Collaboration was a different game, sharing ideas, and refining your thinking.

The incompleteness was a way of communicating. The missing parts, the placeholder sections, the stubs, the unpolished notes – they said as much as the complete paragraphs.

And now collaboration is: “hey, read this report I made”. Your eyes glaze over, as you struggle to find the content amongst all the words.

Our goal wasn’t to finish these docs, yet now we’re in such a hurry to do so. Our goal was to use the doc. Now they’re thrown around, disposable and skim-read. It’s hard to see where the work in progress has gone.