Write It Out

This one was sitting in the drafts folder for a week or two, then I saw this post on Twitter:

I wonder what percentage of people ask a question and figure it out on their own before you help them. What about in your experience?

— Amy Caldwell (@amyccaldwell) July 8, 2013

Years ago I had a boss who was my technical superior (he may still be). I used to pop in and out of his office, or try to, and ask questions. Most of them were silly, n00b questions.

He was nice, but busy. It didn't take me very long to "read" that. So I slowed down my pace of questions. I began to write things up via email so that he could respond when he the had time. I started to use forums as well. Then I found was directed to How To Ask Questions The Smart Way.

One of the things that became evident quickly is that I didn't always have to hit Send (email) or Submit (forum post), just the act of writing it out forced me to think through the issue and more often than not, I would figure out the answer on my own.

Flash forward five or six years and I started to receive all these questions, either in person or via chat. "Send me an email" was usually my response, especially if I was in the middle of something (see: Context Switching). I was happy to help, just not at that moment. With email, I could get to it when I got a break (or needed one).

One of my favorite people, Jason Baer, who has worked for RittmanMead for the last couple of years, took this to heart. We started working together in December of 2009 and he would pepper me with questions constantly. I could never keep up. "Email the question Jason."

I didn't realize it, but I started getting fewer and fewer emails/questions from him. He began to figure them out on his own. It seemed most of the time he had just missed something, other times he just figured out another way to do something.

Jason is a smart guy. I think I'm smart. Sometimes it's just easier to ask the question without thinking it through. In fact, I do that quite a bit on The Twitter Machine ™, especially those errors that I seem to know but just don't have the bandwidth to research (think DBA type questions). I believe the types of questions that should must be written down are those that deal with Approach (design, architecture, etc). Any of those ORA errors better come along with a link to the error code in the documentation and some proof that you've researched it a bit yourself...but then that's getting into How To Ask Questions The Smart Way.

Go out and practice. Next time you have a (technical) question for someone, anyone, write it down and see what happens.