Hey Reader,
What a week.
This week's blog post was published a little later than I planned. I went deep on how to manage stale content in Confluence, and I wanted the guides to be genuinely helpful - not just filler.
If you’ve been finding these emails useful, I’d love to hear from you. Seriously! Hit reply any time. I read everything, and if you’re cool with it, I might feature your question in an upcoming issue.
Also... a big move this week: I’m finally taking this project public.
Up until now, I’ve been quietly building Finally Aligned behind the scenes. But starting this week, I’ll be posting everything I’ve been working on over on LinkedIn.
Not gonna lie... I’m nervous to put myself out there in front of friends and coworkers. But hey, if I believe this stuff actually helps people (and I do), then I’ve gotta share it.
Here’s to showing up - even when it’s uncomfortable.
Finally Aligned,
Josh
📣Spotlight Story
Your Quarterly Confluence Cleanup Checklist
Your Confluence system doesn’t need a total overhaul - it just needs a quarterly cleanup. In this post, I walk you through the exact checklist I use to keep documentation usable, trustworthy, and not buried under a mountain of stale content.
💡Weekly Pro Tip
Page Status is your friend! It's a very quick visual indicator for all readers of a page what the status of that content is.
When content is fresh and confirmed to be accurate, you can very quickly display that with a "Verified" status:
Seeing this Verified badge will give your readers instant confidence in the content. Especially if you set up an automation to remove the Verified Status after a set amount of time of no content updates. 😉
Interested in that witchcraft? Automation is the answer there. I go over this in this week's article: Your Quarterly Confluence Cleanup Checklist
❓Question of the Week
How often should we be reviewing and updating pages in Confluence? Is quarterly really enough?
Honestly, it depends on your team’s size and how fast things change. But in most cases? Quarterly is the minimum recurrence I recommend if you don’t have a formal review process baked in.
Think of it like brushing your teeth. You could wait until there’s a problem, or you could just do a quick, routine check-in every so often to keep things healthy.
A quarterly review gives you a moment to pause, spot outdated stuff, reassign page ownership, and fix anything that’s quietly eroding trust.
That said, not all content ages at the same speed.
If it’s something tied to compliance, onboarding, or anything customer/member-facing, it might deserve a monthly review. For everything else, quarterly keeps the chaos in check without becoming a full-time job.
This week’s blog post walks through my full cleanup checklist - and I even included a downloadable PDF + bonus guides if you want to steal my system. 😄
🔜Sneak Peek
Coming soon: Top 3 Documentation Mistakes Teams Make (and How to Fix Them!)
Most teams don’t fail at documentation because they’re lazy... they fail because no one taught them how to make it usable. In next week’s post, I’m breaking down the top 3 mistakes I see over and over again in Confluence (yes, even from smart, well-meaning teams). More importantly, I’ll show you how to fix them without doing a total rewrite.
If your docs feel cluttered, ignored, or just slightly cursed... this one will be for you.
Finally aligned,
Josh
