The worst documentation workflow is the one that starts with "open the wiki."
You were in the middle of a fix. Now you are in a different product, different editor, different mental mode, trying to remember what you already said in the PR description ten minutes ago. That is not documentation. That is homework.
What this article solves: How to capture docs where work already happens—so engineers stop losing flow to maintenance nobody will do anyway.
Who this is for: Teams who want fewer tabs, not another "documentation champion" volunteer role.
The real cost of context switching
Studies often cite ~23 minutes to refocus after an interruption. Whether the number is exact or folklore, the feeling is universal: leaving GitHub to update Confluence feels like leaving the gym to file your taxes.
Engineers already document. They just do it in the wrong places for long-term memory:
- PR descriptions (good, underused)
- Slack threads (good, unsearchable in six months)
- Jira comments (good, disconnected from code)
- Meeting notes in Google Drive (good, never linked to anything)
The fix is not "try harder." It is stop asking people to switch contexts to preserve context.
Generate docs from GitHub, not from a blank page
GitHub is where the explanation is already under social pressure.
When ScopeDocs (or any source-linked approach) generates from PRs:
- The summary inherits the author's intent
- Review comments capture rejected alternatives
- Merged code proves the doc is not fantasy
Try this week: Require two sentences in every PR: What and Why. You will get better auto-generated docs than any template police could enforce.
Capture the argument in Slack—without archiving #random
Slack is where "why not use Postgres?" actually gets answered.
You do not need every message in the knowledge base. You need decision-shaped threads linked to the PR that implemented the outcome. Bookmark the thread, paste the link in the PR, move on. No wiki tab required.
Teams on Jira instead of Linear get the same win: connect the tracker so ticket narrative and code changes stay in one traceable chain.
When the wiki is still official: Notion or Confluence
Many companies still publish to Notion or Confluence for stakeholders who will never open a PR.
That is fine. Connect the wiki so it stays a face, not the brain. The brain is GitHub plus the conversations and tickets that led to merge.
Context switching drops when engineers stop duplicating Confluence pages by hand after every sprint.
On-call is a different kind of switch: Datadog
During an incident, the worst switch is GitHub → wiki → guess.
If your team lives in Datadog, linking monitors and incident context to runbooks means the on-call engineer stays in the mental model they already have: something is red, what does the doc say about this alert?
That is not "more documentation." It is documentation that respects how 2 AM actually works.
Three workflows that should not require a new tab
| Moment | Stay in… | Doc comes from… |
|---|---|---|
| Shipping a feature | GitHub PR | PR + review + linked Slack/Jira |
| Designing on a call | Calendar → Fathom summary | Call notes linked to ticket/PR |
| Page wake-up | Datadog | Runbook tied to monitor + fix PR history |
What we are not claiming
This does not eliminate thinking. It eliminates re-typing what you already said somewhere else.
Someone still edits tone. Someone still decides what belongs in onboarding vs on-call views. The win is that those edits start from real artifacts, not a blinking cursor in a wiki nobody trusts.
Checklist
- PR template includes Why + How to verify
- Slack/Jira threads get linked in PRs when decisions happen there
- Wiki integration (Notion or Confluence) for publish-facing pages only
- Datadog connected if runbooks and monitors diverge today
- Team agrees: no standalone doc task unless the source does not exist
Less tab-hopping. More receipts. That is the whole game.