What does it mean that tool documentation for yourself?

Document your tool configurations and workflows so you can recreate your setup.

Example: You spend a Saturday morning setting up a new laptop. You install your text editor, your note-taking app, your task manager, your terminal emulator, and your browser. Each one needs configuration. Your text editor uses a specific color theme, a custom font, twelve extensions, and two dozen keybinding overrides. Your terminal emulator has a custom shell prompt, four aliases that save you twenty minutes a day, and a PATH variable that points to three different language runtimes. Your note-taking app has a folder structure you refined over two years, a set of templates for different note types, and three plugins that automate your daily review workflow. None of this is recorded anywhere. It lives in your memory — or more accurately, it lived in your memory the last time you set it up, eighteen months ago. Now you are reconstructing from fragments: half-remembered settings, forum posts you bookmarked and lost, trial-and-error reinstallation of extensions whose names you cannot quite recall. Eight hours later, the laptop is functional but wrong. Something is off about the keybindings. One of the aliases is missing. The note templates do not match what you had before. You have rebuilt approximately eighty percent of your cognitive infrastructure, and the missing twenty percent will haunt you for weeks as you stumble into gaps you forgot existed. Contrast this with a colleague who maintains a personal setup document — a living file that records every configuration choice, every extension, every alias, every template, with the reasoning behind each decision. Her new laptop setup takes ninety minutes. Not because her system is simpler, but because she does not have to remember it. The documentation remembers for her.

Try this: Create your first tool documentation file today. Choose one tool you use daily — your text editor, your note-taking app, your terminal, your browser. Open a new document (plain text or Markdown) and write down everything that makes your current configuration different from the factory defaults. Include: the name and version of the tool, every setting you have changed from default (and why you changed it), every extension or plugin you have installed (and what each one does), every custom keybinding or shortcut (and what workflow it supports), and any configuration files or dotfiles involved (with their file paths). Do not try to be comprehensive across your entire stack. Document one tool thoroughly. This should take 20-40 minutes. When you finish, save the document in a location you will not lose — a dedicated folder in your notes system, a git repository, or a cloud-synced directory. Next week, document a second tool. Build the habit of documenting as you configure.