How do I perform? For knowledge workers, How do I perform? may be an even more important question than What are my strengths?. A few common personality traits usually determine how a person performs: Am I a reader or a listener? How do I learn? Writing? Taking notes? Doing? Talking? Do I work well with people, or am I a loner? And if I do work well with people, in what relationship? Do I produce results as a decision maker or as an adviser? Do I perform well under stress, or do I need a highly structured and predictable environment? Do I work best in a big organization or a small one? Peter F. Drucker, Managing Oneself personality
What Le Corbusier got right about office space An Article by Tim Harford timharford.com In the 1960s, the designer Robert Propst worked with the Herman Miller company to produce “The Action Office”, a stylish system of open-plan office furniture that allowed workers to sit, stand, move around and configure the space as they wished. Propst then watched in horror as his ideas were corrupted into cheap modular dividers, and then to cubicle farms or, as Propst described them, “barren, rathole places”. Managers had squeezed the style and the space out of the action office, but above all they had squeezed the ability of workers to make choices about the place where they spent much of their waking lives. ...It should be easy for the office to provide a vastly superior working environment to the home, because it is designed and equipped with work in mind. Few people can afford the space for a well-designed, well-specified home office. Many are reduced to perching on a bed or coffee table. And yet at home, nobody will rearrange the posters on your wall, and nobody will sneer about your “dog pictures, or whatever”. That seems trivial, but it is not. workpersonalityownershipmodularitychoice
Downsides of the internet An Essay blog.royalsloth.eu The type of nitpicking behavior that I mentioned earlier, is especially problematic since it often causes the loss of writer’s authenticity. With time, these criticisms cause one of the following: The writer stops publishing their work. The writer stops reading comments and minds their own business. The writer learns their lesson and sands off their edges in order to fit better in the society du jour. The larger the writer’s audience, the more likely it is for the writer to pick the last option and tone down their voice. You can experience this first hand when reading the essays of prominent bloggers. Their early work is usually interesting and fun to read, which naturally brought a large audience to their doors. But the more the show goes on, the more they will waffle around the topic, since with a large enough audience every thought will be misunderstood and nitpicked mercilessly. writingwwwcritiquepersonality
Idiolect A Definition en.wikipedia.org Idiolect is an individual's unique use of language, including speech. This unique usage encompasses vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. An idiolect is the variety of language unique to an individual. This differs from a dialect, a common set of linguistic characteristics shared among a group of people. Things you didn't know you can be bad at languagepersonalityidentityexpressionspeech
Recognizing Constraints An Article by Jeremy Wagner css-tricks.com Super Nintendo games were the flavor of the decade when I was younger, and there’s no better example of building incredible things within comparably meager constraints. Developers on SNES titles were limited to, among other things: 16-bit color. 8 channel stereo output. Cartridges with storage capacities measured in megabits, not megabytes. Limited 3D rendering capabilities on select titles which embedded a special chip in the cartridge. Despite these constraints, game developers cranked out incredible and memorable titles that will endure beyond our lifetimes. Yet, the constraints SNES developers faced were static. You had a single platform with a single set of capabilities. If you could stay within those capabilities and maximize their potential, your game could be played—and adored—by anyone with an SNES console. PC games, on the other hand, had to be developed within a more flexible set of constraints. I remember one of my first PC games had its range of system requirements displayed on the side of the box: Have at least a 386 processor—but Pentium is preferred. Ad Lib or PC speaker supported—but Sound Blaster is best. Show up to the party with at least 4 megabytes of RAM—but more is better. constraints