Chris Lovejoy's Mailing List

Share this post

65: On working well with others

chrislovejoy.substack.com

Discover more from Chris Lovejoy's Mailing List

Here I share my thoughts and learnings at the intersection of tech, healthcare, data science and personal productivity.
Continue reading
Sign in

65: On working well with others

plus Vitalik Buterin, start-up investing and my personal user manual

Christopher Lovejoy
Feb 13, 2022
2
Share this post

65: On working well with others

chrislovejoy.substack.com
Share

I've heard the saying "a relationship dies one conversation at a time".

I've also heard that "while no single conversation is guaranteed to change the trajectory of a career, a company, a relationship, or a life, any single conversation can".

So I guess conversations are pretty important.

I've read a few resources recently about how to improve your conversations (which I've linked at the end of this email). But I think, more than aiming to have good conversations, there are meta-principles we can follow about how to work well with others more generally.

The principle I want to talk about today is communicating preferred ways of working and the technique I want to share is "the personal user manual".

🖇 Establishing ways of working

The COVID-enabled shift towards remote work has offered many people more freedom to design their own work schedules.

But as society re-opens (and some companies enforce working from the office), there'll be some figuring-out to do.

In my start-up, there's only two of us, which offers flexibility. Right now, we're doing around 2 days per week in-person and the rest remote.

But perhaps more importantly than the location we work from is the way we organise our work together.

📖 The personal user manual

I've seen a trend recently towards writing a 'personal user manual'.

The idea is that you outline yourself and how you like to work in a document - and then share that with your colleagues.

I think it's a neat idea, and probably becomes more useful as the size of your team grows.

So I've started drafting my personal user manual here. I basically looked at the personal user manuals of Roxine Kee, Camin McCluskey and Imran Mahmud and took the subheadings that I liked.

I found it a helpful prompt to reflect on how I work best, and I'm hoping (as my team grows) that it'll be helpful to exchange these with other colleagues.


🔗 Links

The book prompting me to improve my conversations

Fierce Conversations by Susan Scott. This was recommended reading from Entrepreneur First and I’m enjoying it so far. Will share my book summary once complete.

A talk I attended

Soulbound NFTs with Vitalik Buterin (creator of Etheruem). Vitalik explored the value of non-transferrable NFTs in a recent blog post and explored the idea further in this session. I’ve been following Vitalik for years - so fan-boyed out a little bit by asking 5 questions and taking a ‘metaverse selfie’ (ie. screenshot).

The Q+A was great fun, and turns out that, yes, Vitalik is mortal.

Twitter avatar for @patel0phone
Bhaumik 🍎 @patel0phone
"Are you afraid of death?" "Um..yes" @VitalikButerin is mortal confirmed in @KERNEL0x event
5:08 PM ∙ Feb 10, 2022
81Likes2Retweets

What I'm listening to

Cal Newport on the Tim Ferriss podcast. My top takeaways were:

  • Defining your life’s roles and values to help make quicker decisions

  • Scheduling 1+ week of time when you can’t be contacted every 3 months - to reflect, reset your system and to ensure you put systems in place that can enable it

  • An evening ‘shut-down’ routine

Check out the podcast for more context.

What I'm reading

Ins and outs of fundraising today (healthcare startups). A helpful insight into current state of play around investing in healthcare.

The Durability Formula – How It Will Determine Your Startup’s Future Value. A helpful framework for thinking about start-up outcomes. Mostly, contains helpful prompt questions to ask yourself.


Hope you’ve all had a great week,

Chris


💌 Enjoy this email?

Please click the heart below, and forward the email to a friend!

About Me

Hi! I’m Chris Lovejoy, a Junior Doctor and Data Scientist based in London.

I’m on a mission to improve healthcare through technology (particularly AI / machine learning), and share what I learn along the way.

In this weekly newsletter, I share my top thoughts and learnings from each week, as well as links to the best things on the internet that I come across.

2
Share this post

65: On working well with others

chrislovejoy.substack.com
Share
Comments
Top
New
Community

No posts

Ready for more?

© 2023 Chris Lovejoy
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start WritingGet the app
Substack is the home for great writing