Overloaded technical writers are not uncommon. In fact it is more common to see overloaded technical writers than otherwise. There many reasons for this but one of the primary reasons for this could be that usually for tens or hundreds of developers in an organization there are only a few technical writers. And so documentation requests from multiple sources start coming to the technical writers.

This overload leads to long working hours for the technical writer, poor documentation and a bad reputation to software as a consequence. Agile/Scrum and Kanban are two methodologies being enthusiastically adopted by software development teams because of a lot of good reasons. And the same methodologies can help technical writers produce great documentation while managing their time and priorities well.

Here are some links about Agile / Kanban for Technical Writing that every technical writer should adopt on a personal level even if the team they work in does not use Agile yet.

1. Agile Technical Writing Basics
2. AGILE 101 FOR TECHNICAL WRITERS
3. Introduction to agile methodologies
4. Kanban and Limiting the Scope of Work
5. Kanban exposes documentation bottlenecks
6. Can I Be an Agile Technical Communicator When My Team Is Not?