The Wish I had Known Document (WIHK-D) helps you remember how you solved problems, and is meant to be written while you are learning something. It should be used and expanded while you are trying to apply what you learned.Helps you easily communicate basic solutions to other beginners.Helps you remember how you solved obscure issues.Should retain a learner's perspective.Keeps crucial how-to information in an easily perused location.Complements other documentation as a valuable occupational aid.Best constructed while you are learning, and reviewed by experts before using as teaching aids.Can be made with greater technological sophistication, but do not go overboard.Why do you need extra documents to tell beginners how to do obscure things? You need them because hours of work time are wasted when beginners become frustrated while trying and failing to perform non-intuitive operations. They may not remember how to do something, or they may have never known. Regardless, a lack of simple learning and memory aids can waste time and can become stressful for many employees in an organization, including you. What if you could help new users start with all the knowledge that you wish you had known back when you started learning the same thing? What if you could do this efficiently? What if your expert go-to employee could quickly point to a document providing easy answers for co-workers, instead of doing their work for them?The ongoing challenge of remembering, learning, and teaching is part of what inspires us to create protocols, manuals, training videos, FAQs, and so forth. However, these are not perfect solutions. Large documents can hide information rather than indicate it. Large paragraphs in these documents can give the impression that valuable information is not currently in view, which can add to an already-present feeling of frustration. Nobody has time to read everything and perfectly retain it before applying knowledge. Instead, we read most earnestly exactly when we need to know something. FAQs are supposed to address this need, but many FAQs are written before user feedback is received and are often not very helpful beyond initial installation of a program.How-to videos are a special case, similar to seminars, in that they can help the viewer feel confident while they are being viewed. However, many of us learn and retain knowledge by doing instead of watching. Once we follow up on the presented topic, we can be very much surprised to learn that we do not know how to do that much. Additionally, videos and seminars often seem to completely cover a topic, but we may easily overlook how important connected details and perspectives have been unintentionally omitted.A WIHK-D differs from the above alternatives in that it is a practical quick reference, meant to be used while doing something. A WIHK-D should be concise and easy to reference, and it should feel refreshing because it quickly provides a solution that you desperately wanted.A WIHK-D is not a replacement for other documentation. It is meant to be used in conjunction with the manuals, protocols, videos, and seminars that do the heavy lifting in learning skills. When we learn something simple that we wish we had known, we add it to our personal WIHK-D for the topic, or we add it to the organizational WIHK-D if we want to help others quickly reference the same thing.The format is intentionally simple: an introductory category if you wish ('I want to...'), followed by problems and solutions, tasks and protocols, or questions and answers. Each line is kept as simple as possible while being explanatory, with steps or related information clearly visually associated with the problem or question. Proper visual organization of teaching aids is highly important: visual consistency and implied logic through visuals can teach people who had previously found the topic too daunting. The more approachable the arrangement and format, the broader the potential audience. Quick reference in simple text is achieved through the relatively unsophisticated but well-known method of using the Find function (Ctrl-F or Cmd-F) to find a keyword associated with an issue. Here is a plain text WIHK-D document that I created while learning Adobe Illustrator, which has many features that are not immediately obvious. See further below for solutions that go beyond a flat text document.
