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Management of over enthusiastic infodump over chat!

· 11 min read
Liz Argall
Liz Argall
Technical Writer and Program Manager

Infodumping is when you provide a whole lot of information all at once. It's a term that's been used for some decades when critiquing literature and has been adopted by autistic communities to refer to our tendencies to excitedly enthuse on a topic.

Documentarians (aka technical writers, content champions and word nerds) are prone to this trait. In some ways technical writing is an ongoing wrestling match with infodumping as we take on vast amounts of information, process and subject matter expertise and transform it into content that can be used and understood with greater ease.

In an increasingly remote world, our non-technical writing colleagues can find our facility for writing things down a little bit overwhelming. It can be especially frustrating for technical writing when even asking questions can trigger overwhelm in others as it floods their brain with new angles and questions. We can feel stuck in a bind where we're simultaneously told to ask questions, but also please don't communicate so much!

This is why when I was putting together the Neurodivergent Quality of Life Prioritization Matrix management of over enthusiastic infodump over chat was one of the first criteria I listed.

In this blog post I share some tips and tricks I find helpful, as well as some advice from fellow Write the Docs peers. We'll never get it perfect, but perfect is never the point.

thingswithout.com cartoon, Thing 1: does practice make perfect? Thing 2: no. Things 2: practice can be much more interesting. Words float in the air as the Things dance, adaptability, resilience, fluidity, new questions

It's hard when we "think with our fingers!"​

I like to "think with my fingers," to have a conversation in written words. In many ways, that's what I'm doing now. This trait can sometimes get us into trouble in group chat.

Who else has had the following situation? Someone says (writes) something, it sparks an idea. You get excited. You reply, either in an enormous single reply wall of text, or in a series of excited smaller replies. Either way, the virtual room falls silent, and you think, "oh no, I've done it again."

It happens to everyone and it's a normal, natural state of things. It's how much and to what degree. To paraphrase Rick Green, infodump in chat is like height. Everyone has some, but if you're 10 feet tall you're going to have a lot more problems with ceiling fans and walking into rooms.

To extend the metaphor further, you might have great difficulty in normal rooms, but in the right environment you can excel. Inside at a crowded friends birthday party, you'll need to squeeze yourself down a bit, so you don't stand on people. Meanwhile, on the basketball court you might have a thrilling time as you lope around with other athletes.

Just grimly telling yourself, "I just need to do better," only gets you so far when you're trying to operate in multiple spaces. By the end of this blog post you should have (or be reminded of) a few more strategies, so you're not just trying to white-knuckle yourself into being smaller.

Document workplace operations​

Ideally, work with your team to create or update a Teams Working Agreement, you'll all get a lot of benefit from the process and it's good to check in with it. If there's resistance to creating such a thing you can still document team guidelines in a formal or informal playbook.

It's also helpful to create a Personal User Manual, and the nice thing about a Personal User Manual is that you don't need whole of team buy in to just do it for yourself. I've linked to some Atlassian tutorials for creating agreements and the manual as I like how they approach things, but these processes are completely platform agnostic.

Find your basketball courts​

Pent up energy needs go somewhere. If you have an active brain wrestling with ideas and questions, find appropriate solo and human outlets.

Journal​

For real! I resisted this for a long time, especially as I had a historical tendency to spiral into negative thought patterns when I did journal. Then I realized that journalling was a great way to practice conversations with other people. I could do a lot of imaginary back and forth in my journal that historically I might have done in chat.

My journalling these days is predominantly to do lists, exploring ideas (such as the first draft of this blog post) and imagining conversations. It's great for processing conversations after the fact as well, I get to have my "and another thing!"... and sometimes as I explore the conversation further, without that pesky other human to annoy me, I can see their side of the story more clearly!

When I was a reluctant journaller I set myself the goal of 10 minutes journalling at any time of the day. These days it's often half an hour in the morning, half an hour in the evening, plus check ins and noodlings through the day. 10 minutes any time of the day is still my gold standard. I find it's important to have a really small minimum standard and feel good when I achieve it. Then it can feel like a rewarding time to settle your thoughts, rather than a big obligation.

I find it useful to have structured time to journal as well as having a book close to hand when I want to infodump in spaces where that's not a welcome activity. Right now I'm using graph/college ruled composition books, so I can have stream of consciousness at the bottom and to do lists on grid paper at the top.

Colleagues who get you​

See if there are colleagues on a similar wavelength to you that you can infodump with, either in person or over chat. It can be handy to have a regular meetup as well where you can let off steam. Establish some clear ground rules to help things flow, such as:

  • Chat is asynchronous, timely replies are not an expectation
  • It's ok not to reply at all
  • Some content, cool links and so on might not be read at all.

We might assume people have these implied rules, but it's still nice to make it explicit. We are process wonks after all!

Peers who get you​

Find other online communities where you can share some of your thoughts and explorations (while scrubbing off details where necessary). The Write the Docs is a good place to start with. Go for spaces that feel expansive and can help you find solutions. As a general rule, try to find spaces where you generally feel better afterwards, rather than stuck in a despairing spiral.

Organize your thoughts​

When in doubt draft somewhere that is not the chat, revise, then post!

Use meeting agendas to capture questions​

I last week's article I wrote about the value of writing agendas and minutes. Meeting agendas are a great place to capture questions that aren't time bound. You can use the 1:1 meeting template I created, update the agenda in the calendar invitation, or update a task/ticket associated with the meeting

Use tasks/tickets to capture thoughts​

It doesn't matter whether you use Jira, ADO, Zendesk or some in-house solution, use the project management tools in your workplace to capture your thoughts and organize them. Use tags or columns to identify how mature the idea is and how you'll circle back to them. Backlog grooming can be a handy way to sort through what's a fun distraction and what's really important.

A lot of people treat tasks as stubs, but you can use the comments and details section to great effect.

Create an enormous document!​

When I'm onboarding to a new project or feature, I create an enormous document. I dump all my stream of consciousness into it, all my questions, all my ideas, all the requests and projects. As I get to know the team I start to refine the document. I use headers and sub-headers to group ideas.

I then have a great document I can go over with my leads. They can see what I'm thinking, how I'm seeing the situation. From there we can prioritize and triage the work. Solo technical writers are often thrown into the thick of things and I've found this strategy very helpful. It's basically building my own roadmap on the fly.

Work with a coach​

Brain coaches can be as amazing or meh as a physical coach. There are ones that specialize in different types of neurodiversity and nerderies. If you don't identify as neurodiverse but despair of finding a therapist who "gets IT," try looking for a therapist who has lots of experience working with autistic adults. There are lots of autistic folks in IT, so they'll likely be more familiar with the wild worlds technical writers can inhabit.

Brain coaches have many different specializations and labels, and we all have slightly different goals. Diversity in goals means diversity in coaches, just like there are some folks training for an ultra-marathon, others want to train in Aikido, and some have robust knees enough to play Ultimate Frisbee! Some coaches will suit you, some won't.

You're not alone!​

I asked people in the Write the Docs community what strategies they had, and here's some great advice and solidarity.

Lisa Clarke​

I have experienced feeling like I am spamming the group, even if everything I have to say is relevant and potentially useful. It's hard to know if a feeling like that is in your head, or if your coworkers really are thinking, "oh here she goes again with the long messages with too many details that I don't feel like reading"

As for how to combat that? I tend to pre-write what I want to say in a text editor, and then ruthlessly simplify it before posting. I try to embrace bullet points and eschew walls of text. I have to work to be more to-the-point in my communication, because my default mode is "super wordy".

In other words, I try to apply the same strategies to group messaging as I do to making my docs more readable.

Tim McMackin​

Yeah, I've been called out on this. I'm one of the only remote employees, and we've been asked to do more discussions in private channels (as opposed to DMs) so I post a lot in slack. The only way I've been able to slow down is to spend more time doing research on my own and exhaust independent research before asking questions, even if it costs me time. I don't really like that but maybe it will build some more skills over time.

Stacy Ford​

I do a lot of research before asking questions. And tend to type then pause and edit. For work, that is. For more chatty things, like this, you see me typing things like this comment, where I add addendums and don't edit more.

But with work-related chat, I have found I am more successful if I research a lot then come in with a question and my thought as to what the answer might be. And I will restate things to developers when they info-dump on me.

I also sometimes use Jira cases as notebooks and will have a running comment going there where I info-dump and then edit before I hit save, so I can keep the notes connected to the case.

Jill Koglatis​

In our team we had at different points (in different team setups) communications workshops. Those were not meant to teach any techniques, but to understand the team mates better. So cultural background, information preferences etc. Very eye-opening for everyone. It also made certain expectations clearer, for example on the extent of searching yourself before a question should be asked etc.

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