Write it down: the cheapest productivity tool

My memory is fine until it's 1 a.m. and a server needs attention. That's when I'm glad past-me wrote down the exact commands and the order they run in.

I keep short runbooks for anything I do more than twice: deploy steps, restore steps, onboarding a new customer. Ten lines is enough. They turn stressful tasks into checklists.

Writing also clarifies thinking. If I can't explain a decision in three sentences, I probably haven't made it yet.