I recently encountered an interesting question:

    "How do you work?"

  When I discovered the question, I realized, "Nobody has ever asked me that."
  In my entire life.

  People have always said, "Well, -- do this," or "I need you to do that," or even I to myself, "I need to do X," but nobody has ever asked me, "How do you work?"

  And even asking myself, "How do I work?", I couldn't even come up with an answer, -- because nobody's ever asked me.
  (It takes some time for me to formulate my thoughts.)

  I am taking a very much "Appreciative Inquiry" position with respect to the question

  So last night I jot down a few first stabs at the question:

• in bursts:  I work in 1-2 hour bursts, with unstructured time between bursts.
• territorially:  When I work alone, I come up with "what makes sense to me," regardless of what it's requested, and go with that...
• root-cause:  I like to find "what made this situation?", and then address that, when I can.
• by my own research:  I don't like asking for help;  I prefer to look at manuals and figure it out on my own.
• ...or in a team:  but I'm much happier if I am part of a live-interacting team, or an environment where questions can very casually be asked -- the environment needs to be co-present or technologically similar, and the social environment needs to support rapid question asking
• in a frenzy of inspiration:  I often get a frenzy of inspiration, and race towards the goal -- in order to maintain the spirit.  Inspiration comes from noticing an idea "that just might work," that is relatively simple to do, that originated from within myself, and that holds some kind of fascinating possibility.
• emotionally fragile:  I am emotionally sensitive, and depression or sadness or shame or what-have-you pretty quickly shut me down.  Maintaining a warm environment inside and out is important.
• diversity of tasks: a diversity of tasks feeds me -- social tasks, alone tasks, creative tasks, boring (relaxing) tasks, etc.,.
• incrementally: I like to work on things that accumulate over time, like documentation, notes, ...
• w/ some supervision:  I am prone to get lost in thought or some dimension, and forgetting what's important -- so I appreciate some kind of moderator who can gently point out what's relevant and put me back on the right track
• appreciated:  It is important to me that I am valued and appreciated in my work.

  Obviously, there is more organizing to be done here.
  Some of these "noticings" are too raw, crude, un-situated, in order to be useful.

  But, I think that they can be interrogated and ordered in a useful way, and then knowing that, -- the idea is that I may be able to say, "Okay, -- I work like this.  If such-and-such condition is not met, then it won't work.  And if such-and-such conditions are met, then it will work."

  Can we really know "how we work?"
  Good question.  But I think that the answer is "substantially, yes."

  And I think about it, and I realize, "Figuring out how people work is what we end up trying to do anyways.  So why not jump straight to it?"

  The idea here is not so much to change yourself as it is to change the environment., or the means of engagement with one another.
  Now I'm a big believer in personal self-transformation, but I'm also a big believer in external transformation.
  I also recognize that in any path of self-transformation (or: more easy to see-- working with others:) there are points you can get to where there is just no ability to shove.  You shove shove shove, and nothing is going to change.  So at times like these, you have to work-around, or get entrepreneurial.

  So to test this idea out, what we do is:

• We get a group of people interested in doing some thing.
• Ask the people:  "How do you work?"
  • Since people have never been asked this question before, help them articulate their personal peculiarities.
  • Note everything down.
• Then ask, "How can we work together, to make this thing happen?"
• Create the task and fit the pieces together, aligning as strongly with how people work as possible.

  You might need to change the task itself some amount to make it work with how people work.

  It would be interesting to see afterwards, "Which of our assumptions were true?  Which were not true?"
  "Were we able to do anything that wasn't in alignment with how we work?"
    "If so, what does that mean?"
  "Were we not able to do anything that was supposed to be in alignment with how we work?"
    "What did we learn about ourselves?"