A work friend was toying with the idea of doing a team activity, writing up our personal User Guides. She found the idea when she was reading through different Atlassian playbooks (it’s this one here: https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook/plays/my-user-manual).
I’d seen this particular playbook before, when I’d been searching for ways of making retrospectives a bit more fun for our family meetings, and I’d wanted to try it then but it just didn’t make it onto the priority list.
So when she suggested that we might do it as a team, I happily went through the Atlassian template and started filling it in. We didn’t end up doing it as a team, in the end, but I’m still really glad I went through it — IT WAS SO MUCH FUN!
I was trying to work out why I was enjoying it so much. It can’t JUST be because I’m a technical writer and user guides are my bread and butter — it’s not really a technical manual at all! After a bit of navel-gazing, I realised it’s because I’ve done A LOT of navel-gazing over the last year of pandemic isolation. This User Guide has provided a really fantastic template for putting some of it down into writing. And I do love filling in an outline!
I can’t help but feel that it won’t be “productive” time wasted, given that I start a new job on Monday! I’m actually looking forward to sharing this with my new boss, I expect that he’ll have a good laugh!
So, for your reading pleasure: