When making myself outlines of things at work, I focus on stuff I need to know but for some reason am having difficulty with it. If I get certain types of requests to correct a particular type of error repeatedly, I focus on trying to figure out why I am doing it wrong and how I can stop doing it wrong. Then I note the stuff that I feel I personally won't feel is intuitive or obvious and expect to have trouble remembering to do. If I think the instructions we have suck, I rewrite it in a format that makes more sense to me and run it past my superior to see if my re-interpretation is still an accurate depiction of things.
Am I happy with all this? Nope. But they don't really give us a better method and I am making this stuff up as I go and it is getting to the point where team-members email me and say "do you have a copy of...?", so I have the general impression that my slap-dash, thrown together approach is more effective than whatever other people are generally doing. For at home -- working on my websites and such -- I am not really at a point of "production". I am still surfing HN and talking with my adult sons a lot and trying to nail down a more concrete idea of where to go next. My big focus for a long time was getting well. That still takes a lot of my time, so hopes of figuring out how to support myself as an entrepreneur are still almost a "hobby". That is changing and I may soon need to get a lot more organized and focused. So far, just collecting links to articles and information and emailing stuff to my sons is working okay.