A records request lands on your desk, and the first feeling that shows up is not dread about the content itself. It is dread about whether you can actually reconstruct what happened months ago, in the right order, with the right reasoning, when you did not write any of it down at the time.
Most records training is built around protecting the organization — meeting deadlines, applying exemptions correctly, avoiding litigation exposure. All of that matters and none of it is wrong. But it rarely addresses the other person who is exposed in that process: you, personally, on the day a request touches a decision you made under real pressure, and you are the one who now has to explain it, months later, with nothing written down to go on.<
