The Digital Purgatory

Nervously, the cursor hovers over the ‘Onboarding’ folder, that digital purgatory where hope goes to be indexed. I’m watching a new hire-let’s call him Elias, though his name matters less than the 27 seconds of hesitation before he clicks-as he searches for the legendary ‘Production Deployment Guide.’ He’s been here for exactly 7 days. He still believes that the system wants him to succeed. He clicks. The screen flickers, a white void of a page loads, and there it is: a bold header titled ‘Deployment Workflow’ followed by a single, crushing sentence written in 2017: ‘Documentation coming soon. TBD.’

We’ve built these massive, shimmering palaces of ‘knowledge management,’ these Notion workspaces and Confluence clusters that house 477 folders of absolute nothingness. They are not repositories of information; they are monuments to the intention of having information, which is a very different, much lazier animal.

The Button That Is A Lie

Last Tuesday, I got stuck in an elevator for 27 minutes. It was a sterile, metallic box that smelled faintly of burnt ozone and industrial floor cleaner. I pressed the ‘Alarm’ button 7 times. Every time I pressed it, a small red light would blink, but there was no sound on the other end. No voice. No ‘We are coming for you.’ Just the blink. It was a functional button that performed the action of being a button without executing the purpose of a button. That is exactly what our documentation has become. We create the page, we title it, we assign it a tag, and we feel the dopamine hit of ‘organization’ while the actual knowledge remains trapped in the brain of a senior dev who is currently on a 17-day sabbatical in the Maldives.

“The button is a lie, but the blink is comforting.“

I watched a manager yesterday-she had 27 tabs open, which is its own kind of psychological trauma. She was looking for the ‘Conflict Resolution Protocol.’ She found a document. It was a beautiful template. It had a table of contents. It had a ‘Version History’ that showed 7 different edits by someone who left the company in 2019. But the ‘Actionable Steps’ section was just a series of bullet points that said ‘Insert Text Here.’ She just closed the tab with a micro-gesture of resignation that I usually only see in people who have been waiting for a bus that was cancelled 47 minutes ago. We are documentation-rich and knowledge-bankrupt.

The Ghost Town Storefronts

There is a specific kind of arrogance in a ‘TBD’ document. It says, ‘I knew I should have written this, I want the credit for having started the page, but I don’t actually care if you can do your job.’ It’s the digital equivalent of a ghost town where the storefronts are painted on plywood. You might be searching for the keys to the kingdom and find nothing but a dead link to Gclubfun buried in a footer of a page that hasn’t been crawled by a human eye since the 2017 solar eclipse. At least a broken link is honest. A link that works but takes you to a ‘TBD’ is a gaslighting maneuver.

We confuse the artifact with the activity. Writing a title is an artifact. Capturing knowledge is an activity. We have become world-class at the former and toddlers at the latter. I once saw a ‘Security Policy’ that was 107 pages long. It was magnificent. It had charts. But every single ‘How-to’ link pointed back to the same home page. It was designed to pass an audit, not to protect a server. We build these systems for the ghosts of accountability.

The Scavenger Hunt Forest

Elias is still staring at the ‘TBD’ on his screen. I can see the reflection of the white page in his glasses. He looks older than his 27 years. He’s starting to realize that the ‘onboarding’ he was promised is just a series of scavenger hunts in a forest that has been logged to the ground. He’s about to become one of those people who just ‘wings it,’ making 107 mistakes along the way because the ‘official’ way to do things is buried in a digital tomb that no one has the map for.

I once worked with a CEO who insisted that every single meeting be documented within 7 minutes of its conclusion. It was a performance. It was documentation theater. We wear the costumes of productivity-the headsets, the standing desks, the 107-dollar ergonomic mice-while we navigate a digital landscape that is essentially a series of empty boxes.

The Sin of the Half-Done Guide

I’m not immune to this. I once sent a client the file, ‘The Ultimate Guide to Presence,’ only to realize later that I had only filled in the first two pages. The other 17 pages were blank. I wanted the ‘Done’ status without doing the work. My client never mentioned it, which is the scariest part. It means they didn’t even look. They just filed it away in their own ‘Knowledge’ folder, another empty artifact in an infinite chain of emptiness.

Maybe we need to stop call it ‘Knowledge Management’ and start calling it ‘Memory Archeology.’ Because that’s what we’re doing-digging through the strata of 2017, 2018, and 2019, looking for a shard of something that still makes sense in 2024. Most of the time, we just find the fossilized remains of a software suite the company stopped using 7 years ago.

I wonder if Elias will stay. He hits enter. This time, the results page is actually populated. Then he clicks the first link. It’s a PDF from 2007. It’s so old the logo is a different color. The font is Comic Sans. He closes his eyes and rubs his temples with his thumb and forefinger-a classic ‘cluster’ of gestures indicating a high-pressure headache.

Banging on the Door

We need to kill the ‘TBD.’ If you don’t know the answer, don’t create the page. Leave the void visible. An empty space is a signal; a ‘TBD’ is a lie. I finally got out of that elevator because someone heard me banging on the door with my shoe. Not because I pressed the button. The physical action-the raw, unrefined noise-was what worked. Maybe that’s what we need in our digital systems. Less clicking on ‘TBD’ links and more banging on the doors of the people who are supposed to be managing the knowledge.

Elias finally stands up. He walks over to a coworker’s desk. He’s going to ask a human. The digital artifact has failed him, but the human might just have the 7 minutes he needs to explain how things actually work. He leaves his computer on, the ‘TBD’ page glowing like a headstone in the dark.

How many empty pages are you currently maintaining? How many ‘coming soon’ promises have you made to people you will never actually meet? We are building a library of Alexandria where every scroll is blank, and we’re wondering why the citizens are so uneducated.

It’s time to stop the theater. It’s time to stop the ‘TBD’ madness before we all get stuck in the elevator of our own making, pressing buttons that lead to nowhere while the red lights just keep on blinking.