Unwritten Rules
What the time on an invitation is actually telling you
Punctuality conventions vary by the type of occasion rather than by the person, and arriving exactly on…
· 4 min read
Unwritten Rules
Conventions with no author that everyone is expected to follow anyway.
20 articles · page 2 of 2
Unwritten Rules
How a meeting works out who speaks next
Turn-taking in a group is managed by a set of small signals nobody is taught, and most of what feels like…
· 3 min read
Unwritten Rules
How long you have to reply before the delay means something
Every channel carries an expected response time that nobody publishes, and the message is read against that…
· 3 min read
Unwritten Rules
How a queue makes an exception for somebody who obviously needs one
Letting a person go ahead is an improvised piece of triage with surprisingly consistent rules about who may…
· 3 min read
Unwritten Rules
What a noticeboard is for, given that hardly anybody reads it
A board of pinned paper survives in buildings full of screens because it does three jobs no messaging…
· 3 min read
Unwritten Rules
Who goes first when two people reach a doorway at once
Threshold precedence is settled in about a second by a hierarchy of rules, and the awkward version happens…
· 3 min read
Unwritten Rules
What standing orders in a meeting are actually holding together
The formal rules of a committee look like ceremony, and each one is preventing a specific way that a group…
· 3 min read
Unwritten Rules
The volume conventions of a space nobody owns
How loud you may be in a shared space is governed by an unwritten baseline set by whoever is already there…
· 4 min read