FREEBIE: Personal User Manuals: A Guide to Not Driving Your Coworkers Crazy

Better Teamwork with a Personalised Guide to Your Work Style

Working with other humans can be about as smooth as a cat being forced into a bathtub. Enter the team user manual: your personal "How to Deal With My Quirks Without Losing Your Mind" guide. If you’re working in an office or starting a new collaboration, this is a great way to get to know each other better.

Remember in The Office when Michael Scott created that disaster of a orientation video? Yeah, we're doing the exact opposite of that. Team user manuals are like having everyone's cheat codes upfront. Want to know if Sarah will literally implode if you ping her before 10 AM? It's in the manual. Curious if Alex needs three business days to process any change to his precious spreadsheets? Also in the manual. It's where you confess that you're useless before coffee, that your "I'll be there in 5" actually means 20 minutes, and that yes, you really do need everything in a colour-coded spreadsheet.

Here's the tea: we spend more time with our coworkers than our own families, so we might as well stop playing workplace charades and just tell each other how we function. Plus, let's be honest - we're all a little weird. Some of us need complete silence to focus, others listen to podcasts at work, the ADHD colleagues have their lo-fi Spotify playlists, and that one guy definitely needs to stop microwaving fish in the break room (you know who you are, Steve).

This is why this is so brilliant - a user manual gets all these quirks out in the open before they turn into passive-aggressive Slack messages.