You go on holiday, or you get pulled onto something urgent, or you wake up ill. The branch is half done and everything that matters about it is inside your head, which is now on a beach or under a duvet.
What somebody else finds is a pile of commits and no map.
The fix takes five minutes and almost nobody does it. Write the state of the work down, on the ticket, where the next person will actually look. Not in a message to your team lead, who will be in meetings all week and will not remember. Five lines is plenty. Where the work is now. What is genuinely finished. What you tried that did not work. What you would do next. And the one thing only you know, which is usually something like the staging account has the wrong credentials, or that test fails about one run in six, or ask Priya, she wrote the original.
The dead ends are the most valuable part, and the part everybody leaves out because it feels like admitting waste. Without them the next person spends two days walking down exactly the same two roads and hitting exactly the same two walls. You already paid for that information. Do not take it with you.
Do it before you need it, too. Any day you stop in the middle of a problem, write the five lines then. Not for altruism, but because the next person to pick up your work is you, on Monday, with none of Friday's context and a conviction that you will definitely remember where you were.
There is a fear underneath the habit of not writing things down, and it is worth naming. If the work can be picked up by anybody, are you not making yourself easy to replace. It runs the other way. The people who get handed bigger things are the ones whose current things can be handed on. Nobody promotes the person who is the only route into a system, they just leave them where they are.
Monday: open whatever you are in the middle of and write the five lines on it now, while you still know them.
– Asael Shinder
