You’re back in a college lab, excited about the hands-on experiment. Then comes the dreaded phrase from the professor: “And don’t forget to write the detailed report.”

For many of us, especially in technical fields, that feeling never really goes away. It just changes its name to documentation. Why do we resent a task that is so fundamental to our work? This question led me to a realization about the most valuable resource we have: time.

Programmers exist within a strange paradox: they are notorious for dreading the task of writing documentation, but are the first to complain when the documentation they need is subpar.

Why?

Debunking the Excuses

Let’s first address the common reasons we tell ourselves we hate it. Is it because the task is too difficult?

Hardly. The physical actions are identical to coding—sitting at a screen and typing. Intellectually, explaining a system you just built is certainly not more complex than designing and building it from scratch. The real work is already done. So, if it’s not harder, why does it feel like such a chore?

This leads to the core of the issue. After spending days, weeks, or months creating the most elegant digital widget ever, we feel the project is “finished.” Documentation feels like a tax on that completion, a bureaucratic hoop to jump through.

The Real Reason: A Problem of Perspective

The friction isn’t about difficulty; it’s about motivation. And our motivation is shaped by our perspective.

When you finish building something, you are burdened by the curse of knowledge. The context, the nuances, and the trade-offs are all vividly clear in your mind. The thought of explaining these now “obvious” things to a beginner feels tedious and remedial. You see writing docs (distilling information) as the dull opposite of the exciting act of creation (consuming and applying information).

But the person reading your docs has none of that context. They are starting from zero. The programmer who hates writing documentation is the same person who, five minutes later, opens another project’s documentation and is immensely grateful when it is clear, concise, and respectful of their time. We fail to shift our perspective from the creator’s to the user’s.

A New Perspective: Docs as a Gift of Time

We need to stop seeing documentation as “that thing we have to do.” We need a new frame.

Documentation is an act of respect for other people’s time.

While code is functional, it is not always a good teacher. Well-written documentation is a gift to the next person. It’s a direct transfer of knowledge that saves them hours or even days of frustration. It is how we give back to the community and honor the countless developers whose docs saved us time. It is the final, crucial step in making our work truly useful to the world.