What Is a Personal User Manual? (2022)

These 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".

Oh 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."

So 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I guess these manuals will be outdated sooner than the regular docs - and if your staff has time on their hands to write and maintain them, you might be running an adult daycare center!

This looks to me as the idiocy of the pronouns, on steroids.

They both are based on the wrong assumption that people have to ask your opinion before contacting you, while communication has always been based on shared standards.

Normality exists. It's not something to tend to, but it exists and must be recognized and respected, and everybody is expected to do their share in conforming to normality.

It's absurd to expect people to adjust their communication timing based on each contact's preferences, when the recipient can simply adjust their communication devices to block and filter messages/calls according to their preferences. That way each person only has to do the work once, compared to having to remember each of maybe dozens or hundreds of people's preferences.

It feels clear from the subtext that the value in such a thing would be in communicating where you are generally weak, ie, I don't take criticism well, or I can be pedantic and sometimes all you need to do is ACK my feedback, etc. The examples lack any sort of vulnerability though, they don't introduce any genuine flaws (some of the 'how best to work with me' tips would simply be construed as straightforward praise coming from anyone else).

Its just such a weird intersection. First, you need people that are aware of their interpersonal pain points and for those problems to be deep rooted enough that an onboarding doc makes sense. Then, you need those same people to accept being emotionally vulnerable in a space others are going to use for blatant self promotion - in this case just being ignorant of your own flaws counts because you will write some dumb shit like 'I am data driven show me the facts' but in reality you will base decisions on your gut and a spreadsheet you threw together.

Anything other than "I am responsive to all communication at all times and happy to switch focus to whatever you need me to do at a moment's notice, boss" is going to come back and bite you in the ass, isn't it.

The way to deal with unwanted interruptions is to ignore them and then later claim you were so busy you didn't notice. No downside to that. (Headphones help with this if they've forced you back into an office.)

This would be better suited for volunteer situations like unpaid open source work, where people have their personalities out in the open and don't conform to externally imposed expectations.

If you're employed in a company or organization, you have to conform your personality to their manual, modulo reasonable wiggle room. That's it.

Nobody has the time to read N different manuals, and then ponder over interpretations in order to decide on how to proceed.

That 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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1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Thinking_Hats

Ime these are always "write-only" documents. Sitting in PowerPoint on a SharePoint drive somewhere, never to be read...

On the individual level this seems absurd. It won't be read before contacting someone new. It will however annoy some people to have specified some arbitrary preferences and then have them routinely ignored by everyone.

Something along these lines is a good idea for a job listing though. Come up with a broad sketch of how the current team works and likes to work, have the team edit it until rough consensus, add it to the job listing. The best I've seen in that direction is https://github.com/symmetryinvestments/overview/blob/master/...

> Qualities and traits we value

Usually this is something vague around inclusivity and niceness. I can't remember the stated corporate qualities of anywhere I've worked, though the reality tends to stick in the mind. Symmetry have not taken that stance. The examples I find most interesting from that section are

> Practical people who are at the same time unreasonable when they ought to be

> Extreme and unusual intellectual capabilities

> Good taste and love of beauty

It's not enough to tell me whether I'd like to work there or not - in particular trading firms are usually obsessed with people sitting in office blocks - but it's higher signal than the usual waffle about everyone working together nicely to make things nice.

Alternatively everyone can just be grown up and behave appropriately in the work environment because that's part of the contract you signed.

I am going to dig up this gem from the old days:

Richard Stallman has rider... (see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3159210 )

Sorry 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.

What an absurd idea. What is it with the tech field and formalising every last bit of interaction? It is fundamentally dehumanising.

Jeez, I love not working for a big company.

> In fact, remote and hybrid employees score higher than full-time office workers on all elements of the employee experience, including on culture-adjacent measures like sense of belonging at work and value of relationships with coworkers.

This is being 'phrased' as though full time workers aren't experiencing any or their experience doesn't count. But looking at the charts and how close many of the results are, it appears more that the experience is split across the three types of workers, with remote only just edging out the others.

I just want an option in Slack that automatically rejects any message like "Are you busy?" or "Hi, I have a question" without notifying the recipient.

Seems quite similar to https://www.manualof.me/

I wonder in what type of bubble this was created and seen as a good idea.

It seems like something that enables and promotes mental illness and would actually be counterproductive to uniting people towards a common goal, and rather would develop pettiness and fiefdoms.

The HR-mandated version of "Let's hold hands and tell each other a secret."

Just submit a DnD character sheet and be done with it.

Ummmm, 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.

User manuals are for tools.

I hate all this nonsense. Just the idea that culture is a thing to be created, as if people are blank templates to be filled up on a mediocre manager's whim.

However - content aside - I actually liked the page layout. I liked the clickable, table of contents thing on the side, that disappears if the page is narrow. This sort of presentation of text is really nice, imo.

"Some assembly required. Batteries not included."

This is absurd.

I think either Adam Bryant (organizational psychology at Wharton) or Erin Meyer (same at INSEAD) turned me on to this idea. I think it's generally a good one to (very slightly) accelerate new working relationships to a place of trust, and the emotional pearl-clutching in this thread is interesting to observe.

The best examples I've seen of such manuals (and the best working relationships that have been informed by them) share a common thread: sharing about ourselves where useful,[^1] in order to help others know us better,[^2] and not to control or compel them to do any specific behavioral thing.

So, far from an "instructions [to follow]" (@phoenixy1) or "a one-size-fits-all approach to how different people should act with an individual" (@ralferoo), I think many people intend that the document simply share context in order that you can understand them better, and do whatever you like with the information.

There seems to also be a suggestion that producing such a document is in and of itself a burden to others (@jasoncartwright is very upset about the "arrogance" of even writing one, let alone "expect[ing]" someone to read it, @phoenixy considers them to be a "pretty unreasonable burden"). I can understand the reaction, but I think provided there is no expectation that anyone read it, or that it be a means of controlling or compelling someone to behave a certain way, it's pretty benign overall. (Like, I think everyone would at least once or twice in their careers have access to such a document about some colleague or another, if they thought it were relatively sincere? If so, I say go forth and self-document, just don't have any expectations.)

Here are the sections in mine:

1. Why I have this thing

2. The success criteria for my role, and some general ways I try to achieve them

3. Some general patterns of working (one-on-one cadence, skip mtgs, whatever)

4. Blind spots I have that others have experienced (all verbatim, sought from a mix of new/old colleagues, a few new ones added each year)

5. A few situations where those same people would encourage others to specifically seek me out in a jam (as before, all verbatim yada yada - not necessarily work-related)

6. Work things I love doing / work things that I find stressful (drawn from scenarios the reader will likely encounter)

Of these, 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6 contain precisely zero information relating to my preferences or instructions on "how to" do something. I'm simply providing what I hope to be useful context about me and my role at work. (Assuming you take me at my word that I am not sharing the things I love / things I find stressful for any reason other than you knowing me better.)

The general patterns of working at 3 contains some preferences relating to out of hours contact (along lines of "I don't check my emails or Slack outside of office hours, so you should call or text me if there is an emergency or if a few minutes of my time can save you several hours on something"). Maybe that's somehow outdated now? It's the sort of thing I like to know before I reach out to someone out of hours – a bit like I know some people who appreciate a heads up when visiting a "shoes off" household, so they can wear socks or clip their toenails.

tl;dr I think if you are clear that you have no expectation that anyone even read it, and share relevant, practical context on working together -- with a significant portion sincerely sought from a mixture of people, rather than your own navel-gazing -- these kinds of manuals can be a good shout.

I like reading them, and I like understanding my colleagues better. So I'll tell you that I would enjoy reading yours, and if you ever write one please share it, and that I hope you read mine. That's pretty much it!

[^1]: What constitutes " useful" is of course my determination to make, just as it's your determination to decide that what I shared wasn't useful, and tell me as much.

[^2]: I guess this is predicated on the axiom that understanding your colleagues better is useful. I suspect it is useful -- I think if I had to bet on whether or not any person is more effective in collaborative tasks with a stranger, or with someone they have worked professionally with in any field for several years, I would pick the latter -- although this is uninformed.