Work, Work, Work...

Having difficulty concentrating this morning. It could be that I didn't sleep altogether well. It could, it could, it could... I'm finally starting to work on labs for the advanced topics product class. After several weeks of research and fighting product glitches, it's nice to return to writing material. Measuring my productivity seems so much easier when I'm producing material; I only need to count the pages. The amount of pages I expect to produce in a day, however, is changing. Prior to working at my current company, I had perfected a writing style that was terse, screenshot heavy, and generally worked very well for the classes I was writing. When I had a solid idea of what I was doing and how to configure it in the product, I could turn out 40 pages in 8 hours. Given that I was running an average of two or three screenshots a page, this wasn't surprising. While this worked great at the time, there's more than a few reasons why I must discontinue that style. While I can produce a lab relatively quickly, it was a huge amount of work. Each time the product changed so much as a favicon, I needed to take all the screenshots over again. Producing the labs wasn't the problem, it was maintaining it once the product experienced an update. I could justify this to my superiors then, although I'm at a lost as to how I pulled that off. I was convinced that the level of detail and quality were worth the extra effort. And, in a way, it did make sense for the classes I was writing. We didn't have a basic, intermediate, and advanced class for the same product. We only had one class that covered everything. We didn't have the infrastructure for anything more. The exact opposite is true for my current job. We do have infrastructure, and it is expected to have multiple levels of classes per product. This does make the writing a fair bit simpler. Instead of considering both absolute beginners and experts that only need a refresher in the same class, it is expected that students have a certain level of knowledge when coming to the class. Without this as a central concern, I am left with a central concern of maintainability. If my project plan is to be believed, I only have a few days for each of the 10 modules to write. This includes both the lab and the slides. Now I not only need to be concerned about producing the material in a way so as to be easily maintained, but it has to be produced at double-pace without taking away from class quality. To gather some ideas, I dug through other courses yesterday that have long been netting positive reviews by students. Terseness doesn't seem to be as much of a problem as I expected, in fact, more students seem to find the course challenging when the instructions are minimal. I will be fighting my own tendencies with this...