What is workflow documentation?

Workflow documentation is a concept in personal epistemology: An undocumented workflow lives only in your head and degrades over time.

Example: You publish a newsletter every Thursday. Some weeks it takes 90 minutes, other weeks it takes four hours. You can't figure out why. When you finally write down every step — research, outline, draft, edit, format, schedule, promote — you discover the variance comes from one step: you sometimes research and outline simultaneously, which produces false starts. The documentation didn't change the workflow. It revealed the workflow you actually have, which turned out to be different from the one you thought you had.

This concept is part of Phase 41 (Workflow Design) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for workflow design.