One good thing is that most desk Manuals are self-generated. Very few supervisors will come to you and demand you create one, doing so is professional business practice and clearly communicates you are part of the business team, intent on making sure things happen properly, even if you can't be at your desk on a given day. It shows your ability to be a professional, even when you're not at the office.

As you begin to document your processes, simply add them to your desk manual on a daily or weekly basis, until you've got a running list by day of the week of duties you accomplish and how you get them done.

Organizing the information into something useful.

As you begin the documentation process you'll find that you tend to generate lots of small lists, and that's fine, but after you've documented for a few weeks, you'll need to boil the data you've collected down into an easy to use format. But how?

First weed out duplicate information. For instance you may have ten lists that say Send a memo to Sales and Marketing, use Memo Template "XYZ, which can be found at C:word/Templates/Memo1.doc.

Begin to separate out the "hard goods," from the" soft goods". For instance you may want to create a section of your manual that lists email lists by department or duty. If your Monday morning meeting is the same eight people, create a list, set up a section for EMAIL Lists and define them alphabetically. For instance:

Sales Meetings, Marketing

Sales Meetings, Salesmen

The memo. Where's the format? Ahhh yet another hard goods section, perhaps entitled: Forms and Templates, and again, defined alphabetically is usually the most simple way. For instance

Memo Templates:

Meetings

Interoffice

Get the picture?