How I Wrote My First How-To Manual While Working for Somebody Else

When I decided to write my first how-to manual, I was employed full-time; I had a wife, and a pre-teen daughter who was in every sport and activity imaginable, and I was delivering seminars and training courses at night and on Saturdays. I had no idea when or how I was ever going to get a how-to manual written!

Then one of my mentors suggested that I carry a cassette recorder in my car and dictate the entire first draft while commuting to my (last) job. And that’s exactly what I did.

When I finished dictating the first draft, I gave the tapes to a transcription service and they created an Microsoft Word document from the tapes, which I then edited, published, and marketed and promoted like crazy. And the rest, as they say, is history. As was the job I had been commuting to while I was creating my first how-to manual.

Nowadays, voice recognition software (like Dragon Naturally Speaking, for example) is getting good enough that you could dictate the whole manual, either directly to your computer, or into a digital recorder that could then be plugged into your computer to allow you to download the digital files into the computer to be interpreted by the voice recognition software.