Creating a Manual of Me.

Creating tools and techniques to help people take active control over their future of work is a core ambition of our Leapers project. Here is the first.

A manual for someone called Billy. Feels a little flat to me.

A few weeks ago, purplesime, one of our earliest members of Leapers, shared his ideas around creating a user manual for himself. You can read the article here, but it really resonated with me, and I thought it could be a valuable tool for not just Leapers, but anyone who is perhaps starting work with a new team, or even just self-reflection upon their working style.

As part of my ambition with Leapers is to create useful tools, resources and techniques for anyone who would find them useful — so the Manual of Me feels like it could be the first of these.

To kick this off, we held our inaugural Leapers get-together, over a Google Hangout. My wifi was patchy, no-one could see or hear me, but we somehow managed to spend an hour chatting about the project, and I left the session excited.

The conversation loosely covered a number of themes:

- Why and How are People Manuals useful?

- Is this the future of the CV?

- What is the difference between Work I do and How I do it?

- Is there a fixed method of writing one?

- The benefits of talking things through with others

- How the Manual is an output of input and reflection

- Negative vs. Positive — how this isn’t a manual of what I won’t do

Whilst we didn’t settle on a singular idea of how these things should or could be created, we did commit to:

1. Start — we’re going to try and build something, not sure what yet, but just get rolling and iterate
2. Stuff in the middle — we’re going to create a space, a channel on Slack where we’ll put all of the materials we found already, that anyone can add to, so if you like the idea of a People Manual, you can have a look
3. Share Madly — we want everyone to feed into this — to let us know what is useful to you, or not

If you’re interested in helping us create a Manual of Me process for the community, or think you would benefit from one, please, come along and join the #letsmake-manualofme channel on slack, and add your voice.