Build a Personal FAQ Note for Questions You Answer Weekly. If you answer the same questions in chat every week, you need a personal FAQ—not another meeting.
FAQ broke: I wrote essays nobody rereads
Symptom: each answer runs three screens. Under stress you paste from memory anyway. Fix: cap entries at five to eight lines. If it needs more, link out to a ref note—FAQ stays a cheat sheet, not documentation theater.
Under stress you will not reread a treatise. Write for the version of you replying on a phone between meetings.
Rosa cut a six-paragraph VPN answer to four lines and usage went up. Shorter was not dumber—it was pasteable.
FAQ broke: answers without last-reviewed dates
Symptom: you paste stale policy into Slack with confidence. Fix: every entry ends with Last reviewed: YYYY-MM-DD. Update the date when reality changes, not when you feel guilty.
Stale answers without dates create false confidence—and you will paste them as if they were still true.
FAQ broke: I never promote repeats from sent mail
Symptom: you type the same explanation weekly. Fix: third time you send an answer, promote it to FAQ that day—not someday. If you typed it thrice, the FAQ has earned a slot.
Promotion takes ten minutes and saves hours across a quarter. Mine chat for question marks and repeated explanations during a fifteen-minute Friday block.
Promotion day workflow: copy best sent answer → trim to eight lines → add paste snippet → set last-reviewed date → pin snippet tool if new. Same day as third send, not someday when calm returns.
Rosa reviews volatile entries monthly and stable entries quarterly—calendar beats guilt. Stale dates visible on the cover list: PTO, on-call, deploy freeze.
FAQ broke: sensitive details in a shareable doc
Symptom: personal FAQ lives in a team drive with customer specifics. Fix: keep sensitive FAQ private; sanitize outward pastes. Your FAQ is a role cheat sheet, not an unofficial policy wiki that creates avoidable risk.
Weekly question mining — fifteen minutes, Friday
Add at most two new entries per week. Retire questions that stopped recurring—a short living FAQ beats a long dead one.
Entry micro-template:
- Q: plain language question
- A: short answer, bullets allowed
- Paste snippet: two lines safe for Slack
- Last reviewed: date
Does the FAQ reduce meetings?
Only if you paste it. Measure: answers copied from FAQ without archaeology per week. Zero for a month means you built a shrine—put the FAQ link in status, bookmark bar, or snippet tool.
FAQ reduces meetings only when you actually use it as a first response. Visibility beats perfection; a imperfect FAQ you paste beats a perfect FAQ you forget exists.
Rosa pinned her FAQ snippet tool to ;;faq after a month of zero usage. Usage jumped—not because answers improved, because friction dropped.
Sample FAQ entries Rosa actually uses
Q: How do we request design review?
A: File DR-### in portal; attach Figma link; 48h SLA for P2.
Paste: File DR in portal + Figma link; 48h for P2.
Last reviewed: 2026-03-28
Q: Who owns production deploys on weekends?
A: Platform on-call; page via PagerDuty service prod-deploy.
Paste: Weekend deploys: platform on-call via prod-deploy PD.
Last reviewed: 2026-04-01
Two entries, eight lines total. That is the density that survives stress.
Rosa retires entries when nobody asks for a quarter—not when she gets bored editing. Dead questions shrink the FAQ; living ones stay sharp.
Third-party questions count too: if partners ask the same thing three times, promote a sanitized paste snippet—even if you never typed it in sent mail yourself.
Rosa’s Friday mine — from sent mail to FAQ
Every Friday Rosa opens sent mail filtered to last seven days. She highlights questions she answered twice or more. Max two promotions per week. Example: teammates kept asking about PTO handoff during vacation—third answer became a four-line FAQ with paste snippet.
FAQ size stayed under twenty entries for a year—living, not encyclopedic. She links to official policy instead of copying PDFs.
Usage metric: FAQ pastes per week. Target three or more during busy months; zero means visibility problem, not content problem.
Friday mine takes fifteen minutes: sent mail, two promotions max, retire one stale entry if nobody asked all month.
Stale FAQ paste — Rosa’s correction habit
Rosa pasted an outdated PTO policy once and got corrected in thread. Now she reads Last reviewed before every paste. If date is older than thirty days for volatile topics, she verifies in thirty seconds before sending.
Correction habit beats longer FAQ entries. Trust comes from freshness signals, not length.
Volatile topics list on her FAQ cover: PTO, on-call, deploy freeze. Stable topics review quarterly.
Private vs team FAQ — two layers
Rosa keeps a private FAQ with role shortcuts and a sanitized team FAQ with paste-safe snippets only. Promotion flow: private first, sanitize, then team if others ask twice.
Mixing layers caused one leak of internal escalation names. Separation takes five extra minutes per entry and prevents one bad paste.
Team FAQ stays under fifteen entries; private FAQ can grow slightly larger because search is hers alone.
When Rosa promotes to team FAQ, she rereads once for names and internal-only paths—sanitize pass takes ninety seconds and prevents one bad paste that erodes trust for a month.
Third repeat earns a FAQ slot
Treat FAQ growth as evidence of recurring friction in your role—not as a writing project. Small entries you trust beat comprehensive entries you ignore.
When reality shifts, update before you paste again. A wrong FAQ damages trust faster than admitting you need to check.
Promote on the third repeat, not the tenth. By the tenth you have already paid the tax in duplicate typing.
Keep FAQ entries paste-sized. If you would not paste it in chat, it is too long for FAQ.
Your FAQ is a living cheat sheet for recurring friction—not a wiki, not a memoir. Fresh beats comprehensive every time.
Pin the snippet tool after a month of zero pastes—friction drops faster than rewriting perfect answers.
Third repeat earns a slot—tenth repeat means you already paid the typing tax.