On the possibility of explaining your job away

Because we’re expecting another baby in a few weeks, my wife and I have been preparing for a boring but important inevitability:

Someone else will have to do our jobs for a little while.

One way we’ve preparing, aside from directly on-boarding colleagues in meetings, is by writing stuff down.

In doing this, we wondered:

Is it possible to write yourself out a job? Can you document your role so well as to render yourself replaceable?

If you’re an knowledge worker (who is an employee working for someone else), I bet you sense a little foolishness in the attempt to capture the ins-and-outs of your role.

I think we all feel the fear: If I wrote down how to do my role in a thorough and complete way, any old chump could do my job.

So, we hold onto things, even the dumb things that anyone could do. I know I do: my instinct is to cling to my knowledge, avoiding delegation because delegation would be to admit the simplicity of so much of my role.

Over the next weeks, I’m trying to fight that fear.

If I ever expect to advance in my career, I can’t hold onto every little thing, right?