Roxine’s Personal User Manual
Convictional is a remote team. While there’s lots of benefits to that, one of the biggest challenges is getting to know people. It takes more time to realize people’s quirks because you don’t see them every day. Especially if you’re a new hire.
Thus, a personal user manual for every single person in the company.
Each employee’s personal user manual is a 1-2 page doc, saved in our company Google Drive. Any new hires can go in, read through the manuals, and instantly know how to work with every single person on the team.
This post is a lightly edited copy of the doc I have in our drive.
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How I Think, Work, & Communicate
I am an ENFP-A through and through. Even if you don’t read anything else in this doc and just read that web page, I will make sense to you.
My core values are:
Love
Connection/belonging
Stillness (a combination of solitude and space)
Mastery
Enough
Professionally, I adhere to 3 operating principles when approaching uncertainty (as outlined in Jim Collins’ book Great by Choice)
Fanatic discipline
Productive paranoia
Empirical creativity
Learning-wise, I naturally think like a fox. Once I have the first principles down, I “hedgehog” every other decision.
I’m obsessed with solving the right problems and asking the right questions. I feel uncomfortable when discussions are spent figuring out a solution, than seeing if we got the problem right.
In an ideal world, I will have meeting-less, deep work mornings and, in addition, have pure deep work time, 2 days a week. I also prefer to work on only 1 big deliverable per day. My preferred meeting blocks are Mondays and Fridays, 2:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
I’m usually at my desk 8:30 am - 11:30 am then 2:30 pm - 5:30 pm. My energy tends to flag between 11:30 am - 3:00 pm and I usually work out/take a long break/run errands during that time. I take evenings and weekends off from work. Aside: From 8:30 -- 5:30 my brain is always thinking about work problems, whether or not I’m at my desk. I just can’t turn it off. Still I only track the time I spend in focused mode/at my desk (around 30-35 hours a week) not diffused mode.
I believe being less wrong > being right. I don’t care about being right; I just want the truth (a.k.a. the least wrong answer)
I am a person-person. Numbers are important, but everything I do will always be about human connection and engagement.
While I’ve never managed anyone at work, I’ve never had a bad experience in a school group project. I’ve always been good at spotting issues early and intuit what to do to stop them from becoming problems.
I’m very good at reading people. I have an intuitive sense for potential diamonds-in-the-rough. I can also smell genuine kindness or BS from a mile away. I will be able to tell you whether or not a candidate is a good fit, although I won’t always be able to tell you why.
When approaching problems, I’m a slow cooker > frying pan. Give me a problem and time to let it simmer in my subconscious. That’s how I work best.
I’m great at spotting patterns and tailoring theory to the specific problem at hand. I’m great at turning ambiguity into concrete plans and actions.
I strongly believe in the 80/20 and sequencing. I try to do the right things in the right order, before thinking about doing things right. I’m OK doing something a few times to figure out how to do it and the best way to do it. But you can be sure I’ll automate, build systems, and document ASAP.
Feedback & Support
I try to have a quarterly retreat before I need rest. But many times, I don’t realize that I’m exhausted. Please force me to take time off and assure me that there won’t be consequences. Better yet, and especially if you work with me, seeing you take time off makes me feel that it’s OK to do it, too.
I welcome feedback and have gotten better at not taking things personally. I’m pretty good at culling through input, taking only what’s needed, and leaving the rest. So just send them my way.
I’m great at starting projects and getting the 80/20 out. But getting to 100% is a struggle for me.
I am not detail-oriented by nature, although my systems, pre-flight checklists, reminders, and lists make it seem like I am. (For personal productivity, I loosely follow David Allen’s Getting Things Done philosophy. For personal knowledge management, I’m a fan of Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain.)
When working with people, I struggle with using the stick over the carrot, even when the former might be more effective.
Please push me to dig into the numbers and the hard science. I have an aversion to math and quantifiable research despite being very good at analyzing them.
I don’t enjoy handling pressure, emergencies, and urgent matters. It messes with my focus on the important-not urgent work I’ve scheduled for the day.
I have a bad habit of being 10% - 15% late and am actively working on it.
To learn more about me personally:
Check out this essay if you’re wondering about what my family’s like