What Is a Personal User Manual? (2022)
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What Is a Personal User Manual? (2022)
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Re: What Is a Personal User Manual? (2022)
#2Oh no, not this again.
I'm not sure I could muster the arrogance to write such a document about myself... and then expect people to read it. The suggested examples of what the document could contain are bizarre and yet also weirdly simple & obvious...
"I am a sponge. I’ll take more content earlier rather than a formal presentation"
"Please give me the bad news before I hear it from somewhere else"
"Be direct. Tell me what you need and when you need it."
Re: What Is a Personal User Manual? (2022)
#3That sounds like a solid framework. Similarly, there's 'Six Thinking Hats' (1985) [1], which is another tool aimed at fostering effective communication.
The challenge with these methods is that when they're most needed, people often revert to more... "basic instincts" :-), sometimes underhanded, forms of communication. They can even twist these tools to serve their own agendas. I wonder if a 'how to talk to me' manual might be giving potential manipulators too much leverage...
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Re: What Is a Personal User Manual? (2022)
#4Ummmm, since you are contractually working for another person or company, it is that person or company HR that defines the "Personal User Manual", and not the employee.
Re: What Is a Personal User Manual? (2022)
#5Oh no, not this again. I'm not sure I could muster the arrogance to write such a document about myself... and then expect people to read it. The suggested examples of what the document could contain are bizarre and yet also weirdly simple & obvious... "I am a sponge. I’ll take more content earlier rather than a formal presentation" "Please give me the bad news before I hear it from somewhere else" "Be direct. Tell me…
"I'd rather get on with some actual work than create a stupid document about me to pander to management's latest whim-du-jour."
I guess it hasn't occurred to them that most introverts would hate having to write about themselves in this way, and a reasonable subset wouldn't be interested in reading what the extroverts have to say about themselves either.
A far better approach is to not have any preconceived ideas about your colleagues, and discover how you interact best as and when the need arises. There isn't a one-size-fits-all approach for how different people should interact with an individual.
Re: What Is a Personal User Manual? (2022)
#6So you expect persons to write a personal user manual. Have you seen what happens to normal docs?
And who has this complete picture of oneself that is not obscured by the lies that we tell about ourselves? The self-deception and the imposter syndromes that we foster?
I guess these manuals will be outdated sooner than the regular docs - and if your staff has time on their hands to write and maintain them, you might be running an adult daycare center!
Re: What Is a Personal User Manual? (2022)
#7These were popular at my workplace maybe seven years ago, and while I was into the idea at first, IMO it was impractical most of the time. Turns out it's a pretty unreasonable burden to place on people that they should read and follow instructions in a document in order to communicate with someone and to personalize their work approach for every person they interact with.
The main context these make sense in is when written by a manager (or maaybe by a direct report for their manager). They can be useful to establish expectations for a team around things like "is it ok to message me on the weekend" and "here's what you should have prepared for our 1:1s".
Re: What Is a Personal User Manual? (2022)
#8This is absurd.
Re: What Is a Personal User Manual? (2022)
#9Sorry but no. I still have to see a single company that REALLY have a documentation culture, meaning a new employee can find a book "welcome here, an overview of anything" and from this all relevant, up to date, organized information of anything she/he have to know, and yes, this would be really helpful, but I'm a human not working in prostitution so I have no user manual.
I normally have contracts I honor and I expect the other party honor as well, I have a reasonable human flexibility, tolerance etc, and all of that demand no manual. The company demand an onboarding manual and tried practice as much as possible because from remote the sole hard part is that. For all, in person or remote, the rest is about documentation in general, not crappy abandoned wikis, not "read the code" on a codebase that would demand years to be understood fully and change faster than such timeframe and so on.
I reject a future of meat-based robots on sale, I like a future of remote workers, humans, that know what to expect each others, because we are all humans, peers between peers.
Re: What Is a Personal User Manual? (2022)
#10Oh no, not this again. I'm not sure I could muster the arrogance to write such a document about myself... and then expect people to read it. The suggested examples of what the document could contain are bizarre and yet also weirdly simple & obvious... "I am a sponge. I’ll take more content earlier rather than a formal presentation" "Please give me the bad news before I hear it from somewhere else" "Be direct. Tell me…
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