"I'll document this later."
No you will not.
This is the most common lie in technology. It is told thousands of times per day, in every timezone, by developers and sysadmins and engineers who genuinely believe it when they say it. They are not lying to others. They are lying to themselves.
The Mechanics
You fix a problem. It took you three hours to figure out. The solution involved a config change, a flag you did not know existed, and a workaround for a bug that is not documented anywhere.
You are exhausted. You are relieved. The thing works now. You tell yourself: I should write this down. I will do it after lunch.
After lunch, there is another problem. Then a meeting. Then you go home. The next day, you vaguely remember there was something you meant to document, but the details are already fuzzy. By Friday, it is gone.
Six months later, the same problem happens. You have no memory of solving it before. You spend another three hours.
The Economics
Documentation has negative immediate value. The moment you write it, you gain nothing. The system already works. You already know how you fixed it. The documentation is purely for future-you or future-someone-else.
Humans are terrible at valuing future benefits against present costs. This is not a character flaw - it is how brains work. The reward circuit does not fire for "prevented a problem six months from now."
So documentation loses to everything. It loses to the next ticket. It loses to lunch. It loses to going home on time. It loses to the dopamine hit of closing the issue and moving on.
The Only Fix
Document while you are solving the problem. Not after. During.
Keep a scratch file open. Paste commands as you run them. Note what failed and why. When you find the solution, you have already written half the documentation. Clean it up for five minutes and you are done.
This works because it converts documentation from a separate task into part of the debugging process. You are not adding work - you are taking notes you would take anyway and making them permanent.
The alternative is the lie. And the lie always wins, because "later" never comes.