Mentavo
Most people know a surprising amount about how they work. That the demanding thinking happens before noon and not after four. That two evening commitments in a row is one too many. That decisions get easier after talking it through with someone.
This knowledge has one drawback: it isn't written anywhere. It surfaces afterwards — "I could have known that" — and fails to get retrieved before the next similar decision.
A personal user manual is an attempt to bring it into one place. Not as self-analysis, but as a reference.
The short version
- This isn't about self-discovery but about making already-known things available.
- The text describes conditions, not traits — "under X I function", not "I am X".
- Evidence matters more than phrasing: every sentence should have two examples.
- Six areas is enough; more produces a document nobody reopens.
- The benefit arrives on rereading before decisions, not while writing.
- Review it once a year — much of it doesn't hold forever.
Why most self-knowledge isn't available
What you know about yourself exists as episodes: a particular evening, a particular week, a project that went wrong. But episodes don't become a rule until somebody lays them side by side.
On top of that, insights like these typically surface at the wrong moment: after the exhausting week, not before it. By then the decision they would have influenced is already made.
And finally there's a quiet expectation that you ought to be able to remember it. Nobody expects that of passwords or appointments — only with knowledge about yourself does writing it down count as a detour.
Conditions, not traits
The crucial distinction, and the most common mistake on a first attempt.
Trait: "I'm an introvert." That's no use on a Tuesday; it's an attribution that reads the same after a week with four evening commitments as before it.
Condition: "After more than two events with lots of people I need an evening with nothing scheduled, or I'm short with people the next day." That can be checked, and it can be planned around.
Conditions always take the same shape: a situation, a consequence. The more concrete the situation, the more usable the sentence. What already runs along as unspoken rules — unnoticed and often inherited — is covered in the piece on the invisible rules that run your life.
Six areas
1. Energy
When do you actually have energy, and what takes it away? Not by feel, but by observation.
Example sentences: "Between nine and twelve is when the hard work gets made; afternoons are only for clearing things." — "Calls drain me more than meetings, even short ones."
2. Concentration
Under which conditions does connected work happen? Place, background noise, time of day, run-up.
"With the inbox open nothing gets made, however long the block is." — "If I have an outline beforehand I start; without one I don't."
3. Decisions
How do you actually decide — not how you'd like to?
"I decide well once I've explained the thing to someone out loud." — "The longer I keep a decision open, the worse it gets, not better."
4. Load
What's the first thing you notice when it's becoming too much? The honest answers are usually unspectacular.
"The first sign is that I read messages and don't answer them." — "I get impatient in traffic before I'm aware of being overloaded."
5. Working with others
What do you need from people, and what reliably creates friction?
"Short-notice rescheduling costs me more than extra work." — "I need the purpose of a task or I do it badly."
6. Recovery
What actually restores — as distinct from what feels like it?
"An evening on the sofa with my phone feels like a break and isn't one." — "After a long walk I'm more focused the next day."
Why rest so often feels like a waste of time in the first place is covered in the piece on that particular resistance.
The evidence rule
Every sentence needs two concrete examples from the past twelve months. No two examples, no sentence.
That rule is the actual mechanism. Without it you produce a text of self-descriptions that sound plausible and can never be checked. With it, roughly half of the first draft falls away — and specifically the half you tell about yourself rather than having observed.
For the surviving sentences, a second check is worth it: could the opposite also be true? If you write "I work well under pressure", you should have two examples and be able to recall at least one counter-example. How to tell a rule from a cluster is covered in pattern or coincidence.
When you read it
Writing is the smaller part. What counts is that the text resurfaces in three places:
- Before a larger commitment. A new project, an extra obligation, a role — five minutes of reading beforehand replaces several weeks of irritation.
- During weekly planning. Especially the energy and load sections.
- After a bad week. Not to judge, but to check whether the conditions were observed.
The third is the most revealing. Remarkably often a bad week can be explained entirely by three sentences from your own manual — which you knew and didn't act on.
It helps in practice if the text doesn't sit in a file nobody opens. In Mentavo something like this can live as a journal entry and stays visible beside goals, routines and check-ins from the same period — that is, where the planning happens too.
What changes and what doesn't
Some of it holds for years: how you decide, how you notice overload, what restores you. Other parts hold for a year: working hours, load limits, priorities.
So an annual pass belongs to it — ideally together with a year in review. Two questions suffice: which sentence no longer holds? Which one is missing?
An old sentence no longer fitting isn't a flaw in the text. It's the most useful part of the pass.
Sharing it — or not
A related form circulates in companies: the manual written for colleagues, often called a "working with me" document. It isn't the same thing, and confusing the two is the most common reason the private version turns out useless.
The shared version is written for readers. That quietly shifts what goes into it: sentences that sound competent, qualities you'd like to have, and nothing that could be used against you in a pay conversation. That's understandable, and it makes the document worthless as a self-description.
If you want both, keep them cleanly apart: two documents, different purposes. The shared version holds ways of working, availability, preferences around feedback — things that make collaboration easier for others. The private version holds everything you can only write down when nobody is reading along.
Order matters here too: write the shared version first and the private one almost inevitably comes out in the same register.
What this article doesn't claim
A personal user manual is not a personality test and not a diagnosis. The sentences in it are observations about your own conditions, not type attributions.
The piece also doesn't claim that self-knowledge produces change. It frequently doesn't — why is covered in the piece on self-awareness without change.
And it doesn't claim everything in it can be honoured. Many conditions conflict with obligations that aren't negotiable. Knowing them still helps — if only because you then know what the week will cost you.
In closing: you already know it, it just isn't written down
The effort for a text like this is one to two hours, and most of that is remembering rather than thinking.
Twelve to twenty sentences is enough. Each with two pieces of evidence, each framed as a condition, none as a trait.
And the moment the effort pays off isn't the one in which the text gets written. It's the one in which a commitment is pending and you spend five minutes rereading what you've long known about yourself.
