Documentation

In case you haven't caught this little bit of news, I'm headed to Chicago at the end of August to study at the Catholic Theological Union.  This means that I am leaving my ministry of four years at the peace and justice center.  It's been a great four years.  I've been able to create a couple of great programs, contribute to education and advocacy materials on a variety of social justice issues, and generally do good stuff.  But I'm leaving my ministry at the end of the month to head on retreat and other summer related activities, not to mention packing.  My replacement starts work on Monday and we will have two weeks of overlap for orientation type stuff.

Which means that for the past few weeks, I've been steadily trying to document all of these programs, presentations and materials that I've created over the past few years.

I've been having some flashbacks to my bureaucratic past, when I was the queen of instruction manuals. I created elections manuals for candidates and initiative petitioners.  I documented our City Code process.  I rewrote our employee manual.  I create a centralized repository of policy documents and created a whole categorizing and filing system for them.  Lots and lots and lots of documentation.

I actually loved it.  I'm really good at writing instructions, and I love to create new programs.  I also enjoy documenting them.  What I don't enjoy so much, is doing it all at once!!!

At more than a few points in the past week I've found myself pining for a pensieve, a la Harry Potter. It would be so much easier to just be like Dumbledore, touch my magic wand to my temple, and extract all of the thoughts, materials, procedures, contacts, etc... from my brain rather than trying to sort through all of my handwritten notes with random scratching and symbolic codes (I am organized, I just forget how I organized things from time to time).

But alas, I do not have magic powers.  So tomorrow morning, nose goes back to the grindstone for the last round of documentation and desk cleaning before my successor comes on Monday.