I Need a User Manual for My Life!

I Need a User Manual for My Life!

 I was doing something routine a couple of days ago — paying some first of the month bills online — and I got stuck. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember the name of one of the people I send payments to. All the information is saved in my bank account’s settings, but I have to enter the name of the recipient², exactly as it appears in my records, to bring everything else up.

That’s when it hit me:

I need a user manual for my life!

I have a password manager, personal information manger, Treo, online todo list, reminder³ system, Moleskine notebook — but nowhere had I written down the step-by-step instructions for making this payment. Nor, I realized, did I have a record of most of the tasks I do routinely. Instead, I remember the first step (visit a website, call someone, open a program. etc.) and rely on the cues presented. If I can’t remember how to do something, I work at it until I figure it out.

How much time do you think I’ve wasted trying to remember simple stuff, like the steps it takes to process photos I’ve taken to print them out, or how to pay my quarterly tax payments, or how to accept new contributors to the Lifehack.org pool and get them up to speed?

What I should have, I realized, is a single place where these processes, from the crucial to the mundane⁴, were recorded. There are a few good reasons to have something like this:

To save time: Like I said, I probably waste a couple extra minutes on just about every routine task I perform. While on a day-to-day basis, I probably wouldn’t need to check my "user manual", it would be nice to have a single reference I could turn to when I got confused. 

For inspiration: Writing a task down, step by step, can help identify wasted efforts and shoddy processes. Maybe there’s a better way to do task x? Also, for tasks I’m likely to procrastinate⁵ on, I’d have a tool to keep me from letting myself get distracted until all the steps were done. 

For troubleshooting: How many times have you done something "the way you always" do and not gotten the expected result. Having a guide to turn to would help make sure I was walking through all the necessary steps and help me see what I’d missed the first time around. 

For training: If I ever hired someone to take over part of my work, I’d already have step-by-step tutorials for them to follow. 

In case something happens to me: If I were injured or even (goodness forbid) killed, how would my family pick up the pieces? I’m the family tech guy — it would be impossible for my loved ones to figure out the assortment⁶ of online tools, software, and hardware I use to manage my business and other projects.

What would be in it?

What would I put in my user manual? Quite a few things come to mind, including:

The tools, both online and off, I use to accept, process, and make payments.

Banking⁷ processes — how I pay bills and receive payments 

Bookkeeping tools — How I keep track of my accounts 

How I add clients and advertisers into my system

How I log into, create and manage posts, manage ads and affiliates⁸, and promote all the websites I run or am otherwise involved with

Google Adwords and Adsense processes — how I identify keywords, how I set up campaigns, how I add new ads to my sites 

How I produce a podcast — my local and online workflows for recording⁹, uploading, and distributing my podcasts

A network diagram of some sort showing all my contacts and their specific relation to me and my work. 

Various checklists for things like packing for a business trip and readying the car for winter. 

What else? Any other process that I might have to repeat, especially if it’s on a semi-regular or less frequent basis.

Renewing my car registration 

Reactivating my health insurance (I teach as a contract employee so I have to reactivate it every time I renew my contract) 

Putting a new syllabus¹⁰ or online course together 

Writing an academic paper 

And so on…

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What would it look like?

Since part of the usefulness of a personal user manual would be the ability to share it with other people, especially if I were incapacitated in some way, using any fancy software tool or online application seems out of the question. The best bet would be to keep a single file in a standard word-processing format¹ (Word .doc, .rtf) on my computer, and an up-to-date hard copy printed out in a binder¹¹.

Finding information in a paper copy might be a hassle, though — a clear table of contents seems essential, and a clear organizing schema. Pages — at least within a section — should follow templates, with the same kinds of information in the same place on each page. I’m torn between two organizational schemas, though: should it be organized by topic (e.g. paying bills, writing articles, organizing courses, etc.) or by regularity¹² (things I do every day, things I do weekly, things I do monthly, quarterly, annually¹³, etc.)?

Maybe both, actually — the point is to be as perfectly¹⁴ useful to someone else as to myself, and who knows how much direction I might be able to give or what conditions it might need to be used under?

Putting it together

I hear you out there, thinking "That sounds like an awful lot of work!" And it does. What I’m thinking, though, is that once a template is created, adding new pages would be pretty easy. And rather than sitting down and figuring everything out, it might be more fruitful to keep the file open and document processes as you perform them in the course of your regular schedule. It might take a few extra minutes per task for a couple of days, but by the end of a week, you’d have most of the tasks you do most often fully¹⁵ documented. Add the monthlies at the end of the month, and add the less regular stuff as it occurs to you, or when you can set aside an hour or two to think about it.

Sound crazy? Maybe it is crazy. And yet I can’t help but think that so many of the organizations I’ve worked for — universities, foundations, museums, the military, corporations — have shelves full of such documentation, from Standard Operating Procedures for various tasks to training manuals to grant-writing templates. If you want to make sure that a certain standard is reached every time you do something, you need to figure out and document that standard.

I may never open my personal user manual once it’s finished — but it will be nice to know I could. It will be nice to know that if I’m ever hospitalized, my partner can make sure that the people that need to know, know, and that at least the minimal¹⁶ requirements of my business could be taken care of. It will be nice to know that tasks I do very rarely are documented somewhere, so I don’t procrastinate by putting a "figure out how to do x" entry onto my todo list — and then procrastinate that task since I don’t remember how to find out how to find out!

What about you? What kind of information would you put into your personal user manual?   

1 format   

n.设计，版式；[计算机]格式，DOS命令:格式化(磁盘)，用于空盘或使用过的磁盘建立新空盘来存储数据；v.使格式化，设计，安排

参考例句：

• Please format this floppy disc.请将这张软盘格式化。
• The format of the figure is very tasteful.该图表的格式很雅致。

2 recipient   

a.接受的,感受性强的 n.接受者,感受者,容器

参考例句：

• Please check that you have a valid email certificate for each recipient. 请检查是否对每个接收者都有有效的电子邮件证书。
• Colombia is the biggest U . S aid recipient in Latin America. 哥伦比亚是美国在拉丁美洲最大的援助对象。

3 reminder   

n.提醒物，纪念品；暗示，提示

参考例句：

• I have had another reminder from the library.我又收到图书馆的催还单。
• It always took a final reminder to get her to pay her share of the rent.总是得发给她一份最后催缴通知，她才付应该交的房租。

4 mundane   

adj.平凡的；尘世的；宇宙的

参考例句：

• I hope I can get an interesting job and not something mundane.我希望我可以得到的是一份有趣的工作，而不是一份平凡无奇的。
• I find it humorous sometimes that even the most mundane occurrences can have an impact on our awareness.我发现生活有时挺诙谐的，即使是最平凡的事情也能影响我们的感知。

5 procrastinate   

v.耽搁，拖延

参考例句：

• Most often we procrastinate when faced with something we do not want to do.面对不想做的事情，我们经常拖延。
• It's easy to procrastinate when the deadline seems infinitely far away.当最终期限总是遥遥无期时是很容易延期的。

6 assortment   

n.分类，各色俱备之物，聚集

参考例句：

• This shop has a good assortment of goods to choose from.该店各色货物俱全，任君选择。
• She was wearing an odd assortment of clothes.她穿着奇装异服。

7 banking   

n.银行业，银行学，金融业

参考例句：

• John is launching his son on a career in banking.约翰打算让儿子在银行界谋一个新职位。
• He possesses an extensive knowledge of banking.他具有广博的银行业务知识。

8 affiliates   

附属企业( affiliate的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• She affiliates with an academic society. 她是某学术团体的成员。
• For example, these security affiliates participated in the floating of 19,000,000,000 of issues in 1927. 例如，这些证券发行机构在1927年的流通证券中，就提供了一百九十亿美元的证券。

9 recording   

n.录音，记录

参考例句：

• How long will the recording of the song take?录下这首歌得花多少时间？
• I want to play you a recording of the rehearsal.我想给你放一下彩排的录像。

10 syllabus   

n.教学大纲，课程大纲

参考例句：

• Have you got next year's syllabus?你拿到明年的教学大纲了吗？
• We must try to diversify the syllabus to attract more students.我们应该使教学大纲内容多样化，可以多吸引学生。

11 binder   

n.包扎物，包扎工具；[法]临时契约；粘合剂；装订工

参考例句：

• The cloth flower snaps on with a special binder.这布花是用一种特殊的粘合剂固定住的。
• Purified water was used as liquid binder.纯净水作为液体粘合剂。

12 regularity   

n.规律性，规则性；匀称，整齐

参考例句：

• The idea is to maintain the regularity of the heartbeat.问题就是要维持心跳的规律性。
• He exercised with a regularity that amazed us.他锻炼的规律程度令我们非常惊讶。

13 annually   

adv.一年一次，每年

参考例句：

• Many migratory birds visit this lake annually.许多候鸟每年到这个湖上作短期逗留。
• They celebrate their wedding anniversary annually.他们每年庆祝一番结婚纪念日。

14 perfectly   

adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地

参考例句：

• The witnesses were each perfectly certain of what they said.证人们个个对自己所说的话十分肯定。
• Everything that we're doing is all perfectly above board.我们做的每件事情都是光明正大的。

15 fully   

adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地

参考例句：

• The doctor asked me to breathe in,then to breathe out fully.医生让我先吸气，然后全部呼出。
• They soon became fully integrated into the local community.他们很快就完全融入了当地人的圈子。

16 minimal   

adj.尽可能少的，最小的

参考例句：

• They referred to this kind of art as minimal art.他们把这种艺术叫微型艺术。
• I stayed with friends, so my expenses were minimal.我住在朋友家，所以我的花费很小。