I think the older I get, the less I take things seriously. Or maybe I'm learning about what's important.
Let me explain. I work in a relatively high-stress job in which I have to hit deadlines and have documetation which is at least close to talking about what the product does. This is tricky sometimes because programmers tend to design on the fly and the writers are often the last to know that an interface changed or a new feature was added, etc.
When I first started in this biz, I sweated every comma. I took endless screen shots, making sure I had exactlyy the right kind of data showing in my examples, and so on.
And now? {shrug} I don't worry about that as much any more. I've discovered over the years that [1] people don't really care about documentation and [2] people are very forgiving. Oh, yeah, you get the occasional butthead who whines about things, but generally customers have a 'hey, close enough for me' attitude.
I think the use of online documentation has fostered that. When print books went away people SCREAMED. Then they found that they could do without them ... yeah, painful at first, but it was doable. Now if customers get *any* documentation that's relatively coherent, they're happy.
My attitude was reinforced last night when I was working on the monthly newsletter for my local writer's chapter (I'm the newsletter editor). The president, who reviews the newsletter, was having a meltdown because of the way I'd formatted an inclusion of extra information. I just jerked the extra info out, put it in its own little document, slapped in some other info as filler and was done in 10 minutes. It just wasn't important enough to waste sweat on, you know?
I hope this laissez-faire attitude will continue as my daily work life continues to acclimate to the New Big Company who has absorbed us. Every day is a ... challenge in some way.
But hey ... don't sweat it.
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