Your team has spent countless hours documenting everything meticulously - architecture decisions, coding standards, onboarding guides, and project workflows. You've got Notion workspaces, Confluence pages, GitHub wikis, and README files. Yet somehow, new team members still struggle to get up to speed, developers still ask questions that are "somewhere in the docs," and crucial context still gets lost between time zones.
If this sounds familiar, you're experiencing what we call the Documentation Paradox: the more documentation async teams create, the harder it becomes to find, trust, and maintain the information that actually matters.
The conventional wisdom is clear - async teams need comprehensive documentation to function. We've wrote an article that referenced how an async team uses Notion to document everything. However, sometimes it is counterintuitive truth. more documentation often leads to less clarity, not more.
In this article, we'll explore why traditional documentation approaches are failing async teams, the real costs of this failure, and how we can build a more sustainable documentation model that actually works for remote team. But first, let's understand why our current approach to documentation is fundamentally broken.
The Documentation Paradox
Most teams have 200-page Notion workspaces, carefully categorized Confluence hierarchies, and documentation requirements for every pull request. Yet communication breakdowns happen daily.
On the flip side, some highly effective async teams maintain surprisingly minimal documentation. Their secret isn't writing more - it's understanding that documentation is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
Let's break down why more documentation often makes things worse:
1. First, there's the maintenance burden. Every line of documentation is a liability that needs to be updated as your codebase evolves. The more you write, the more likely parts of it will become outdated. It's like trying to maintain a detailed map of a city that's constantly under construction - the more detailed the map, the faster it becomes obsolete.
2. Second, comprehensive documentation creates a false sense of security. Teams believe they're covered because "it's in the docs somewhere." But this leads to a dangerous assumption that documentation equals understanding. It's like having a library full of books but never reading them - the mere presence of information doesn't guarantee its effectiveness.
Three Documentation Fallacies That is Holding You Back
Let's debunk three pervasive myths that keep async teams stuck in dysfunctional documentation patterns:
1, The "Write Everything Down" Approach: "Document everything" sounds like solid advice for async teams. After all, how else will people know what's happening? The thing is, when everything is documented, nothing stands out. Teams end up with sprawling documentation that buries critical information under mountains of routine updates.
2. The "Single Source of Truth" Myth: Every team dreams of having one place where all knowledge lives. But this ignores how information naturally flows in software teams. Knowledge isn't a static resource – it's a living, evolving conversation. Different types of information need different homes. Architecture decisions don't belong in the same place as API documentation, which doesn't belong with team processes.
Some teams force everything into Confluence only to end up with a labyrinth of interlinked pages that's harder to navigate. The quest for a single source of truth often creates a single source of confusion.
3. The "Documentation First" Trap: Many async teams adopt a "documentation first" mindset where nothing is real until it's documented. While well-intentioned, this creates a culture where documentation becomes a checkbox exercise rather than a communication tool. Developers write docs to satisfy process requirements, not to help their teammates.
You may have a "docs first" policy where developers spend 30% of their time writing and updating documentation. Yet when you ask your team for feedback, they'd report feeling out of loop on important decisions.
A New Way Async Teams Can Approach Documentation
Instead of trying to document everything or maintaining perfect wikis, let's shift to a more sustainable model. Here's how:
1. Embrace Just-In-Time Documentation
Stop trying to predict what needs to be documented. Instead, document things as they become relevant:
- When a teammate asks a question twice, that's your signal to document the answer
- When you find yourself explaining the same concept in different Slack threads, turn it into documentation
- When you discover an outdated doc while solving a problem, update it immediately
This way, your docs became more useful because they were created in response to actual needs, not anticipated ones.
2. Approach Documentation as Conversation, Not Artifact: Think of documentation as an ongoing dialogue, not a static resource. This means:
- Using tools that make updating docs as easy as sending a message
- Encouraging annotations and questions directly in the documentation
- Treating documentation as a living notebook rather than a polished publication
For example, instead of maintaining extensive API docs, use a combination of TypeScript + JSDoc comments that live with the code and get updated naturally during development. Their documentation stays current because it's part of the development workflow, not separate from it.
3. Automate What You Can: Modern tools can dramatically reduce manual documentation:
- Use OpenAPI specs to auto-generate API documentation
- Implement automated dependency updates in README files
- Set up automated screenshots for UI changes
- Create automated checks for broken documentation links
You can use GitHub Actions to automatically flag documentation that hasn't been updated in parallel with code changes.
3. The 20/80 Rule of Documentation: Focus your documentation efforts where they matter most:
- 20% of your features typically generate 80% of questions
- 20% of your processes cause 80% of the confusion
- 20% of your architecture decisions impact 80% of future work
Document these high-impact areas thoroughly and let lighter documentation suffice for the rest.
This means accepting that some things don't need extensive documentation. A complex authentication flow? Yes, document it well. The format for commit messages? A simple example is probably enough.
Conclusion
The goal isn't to have the most documentation – it's to have the right documentation that actually helps your team move faster. Perfect documentation is a myth, but effective documentation is achievable.
But perhaps the most important shift is moving away from the performative act of writing docs to feel productive – and toward documentation that serves a clear purpose.