Documentation was my 'weakness'. Now my templates are the team standard

Dyslexic, fifteen years in infrastructure, promoted to team lead three years ago. The promotion terrified me for one reason: leads own the documentation standard, and documentation had been the red pen on every review I'd ever had.

Our runbooks were dense prose - paragraphs describing what to click and type, written by people who find paragraphs easy. Following them during a 2am incident was miserable for everyone, but for me it was near-impossible: eyes skipping lines, re-reading the same sentence while a production system burned.

I stopped trying to write like the old runbooks and made the format fit how I actually think:

1. A diagram at the top. One picture of the system before any words.
2. Numbered steps, one action each. Never 'configure the interface and verify connectivity' - that's two steps.
3. Commands in code blocks, always. Copy-paste beats transcription for everybody, not just me.
4. A 'you are done when…' line so there's no ambiguity about success.

I wrote mine this way quietly. During the next major incident the on-call engineer - not dyslexic - used my template and said it was the first runbook he'd ever followed without swearing. It became the team standard within a year.

The accommodations you build for yourself are usually just good engineering hygiene that nobody bothered to do. Don't pitch them as accessibility - pitch them as incident-response quality. Then let them make everyone faster, and take the credit you're owed.