Call your mom. Drink water. Document.

As a manager, there are three things you don’t do enough.

You don’t call your mother enough. You don’t drink enough water. And you don’t document employee issues nearly as often as you should.

You probably don’t brush for the full two minutes either, but let’s stay focused. Your mom thinks you owe her a call, your doctor thinks you’re dehydrated, and your HR department is certain you’re not documenting enough. All three are right.

For mom and hydration, everybody has their excuses. For documentation, the excuses come in three flavors. Let’s take them one at a time.

Excuse 1: “Nobody trained me to document”

Fair. Documentation probably wasn’t covered in school, and it likely wasn’t in your management training program either. Nobody sat you down and explained what makes an incident report hold up.

But you’ve been training yourself for years. Every time you post a photo with a caption, check in at a restaurant, tag the friends you’re with or write a review, you’re documenting: what happened, where, when, who was there, with a picture to prove it. If you’re on social media, you’re better at this than you think, and you’ve been getting better at it the whole time.

Excuse 2: “I don’t have the tools”

On the floor, in the middle of a rush, opening a word processor isn’t realistic. True.

But you’re already carrying the tool. The phone in your pocket takes photos, records video, captures text and timestamps all of it automatically. What’s usually missing isn’t the device. It’s a place for the information to go: something organized by employee, secure, and quick enough to use between tables. That problem has been solved. Documentation software built for managers works from whatever’s handy, whether that’s a phone, a tablet or the workstation in the office.

The device was never the problem. Somewhere to send it was.

Excuse 3: “Nobody here does it”

Maybe your organization doesn’t have a culture of documentation, where managers reinforce each other’s good habits. But think about how your social feeds work. You post, friends react, you post again. Reinforcement builds the habit.

Workplaces work the same way. When an HR manager says “great write-up, can you add the photo?”, when a GM references last night’s shift report in the morning meeting, when a well-documented decision holds up at an appeal and everybody hears about it, the culture starts to build itself. It’s closer than you think.

No more excuses

You don’t document enough. But the skill is already there, the tool is already in your pocket, and the culture is one reinforced habit away. If you can review a restaurant, post about a weekend trip or text your crew about who’s covering Saturday, you can document a workplace issue to your HR department’s satisfaction.

Document more, stress less, and manage with confidence.

Now go drink a glass of water. And call your mom.