I used to know the code to my parents’ alarm. Four numbers, tapped out without thinking, fingers moving before the mind caught up. Now, every visit, I ask again. The code’s still in there somewhere, buried like a file you know exists but can’t easily find anymore.

Companies misplace their codes the same way. A framework chosen for reasons no one remembers. An instinct that made the first product work, carried quietly by a few people until those people leave. Hard-earned lessons that vanish like they were never written down.

Forgetting at the personal scale sneaks in slowly. Inside an organization it feels more like a trapdoor; one moment knowledge is there, the next it’s gone. What vanishes isn’t usually trivial: half-buried reasons a system held together, guardrails that kept failure at bay, scars no one wanted to repeat.

You can’t keep everything. Plenty of choices fade without consequence. But a few deserve preservation: the hard tradeoffs, the improbable calls that somehow worked, the marks left behind that teach more than success ever did.

The best notes catch the frame around what happened: what felt urgent, what seemed impossible, what the team knew and didn’t know. That frame is what lets the next person debug a decision instead of undoing it. A task list only covers the what. Someone else eventually needs the why.

The trouble is in the timing. We tell ourselves we’ll write things up once the chaos quiets down, but quiet rarely comes. By the time it does, the sharp edges have already blurred. The fix remains, but the bug that prompted it has dissolved into rumor. Answers survive long after the questions are forgotten, and the gap becomes its own kind of debt.

No wonder the skepticism. Most of us have been burned by documentation at its worst: binders of specs nobody reads, process manuals written for compliance, artifacts that look impressive and solve nothing. Writing that performs diligence instead of enabling work.

And yet, scraps matter. I once found a two-paragraph note left by a teammate who’d already moved on. Just a quick diagram and a sentence about why we picked one approach over another. We were about to rip it all out. That note stopped us. It reminded us what problem we were solving and why the imperfect fix was still the best option.

Memory in organizations is less about libraries and more about keys in drawers, the small things, easy to miss, waiting for the moment they’re needed. Teams can lose knowledge slowly, then all at once. But it doesn’t have to go that way. Write while the reasons are still fresh. Not everything, just the choices that cost something to make, or that will cost even more to unmake.

Sometimes all it takes is a note, scribbled fast, waiting like an old alarm code you thought you’d forgotten. Still there when you reach for it.

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