When you start a new gig there’s a lot to learn. Every environment is different and the tools reflect that. The smartest thing that you can do, regardless of your position, is to create a cheatsheet. Write it like you’re giving the next guy a heads up and you can’t lose.

I like to start with this:

touch mynewcompany-cheatsheet.markdown

From that point forward I have a place to stuff the arcane knowledge that will help me (and the next guy). I can use it to figure out what’s going on from day-to-day and I can look back on it to see what I might be able to improve. It’s not something that is terribly intuitive since we’re generally faced with a thousand different things at once, but it will almost certainly make life easire.