lady justice and a gavel

Personality & Pacemaker: Type One- The Reformer/Perfectionist

Welcome to our Personality & Pacemaker series where we explore the ways that personality may affect the writing process. If you’d like to join us on this amazing journey and get to know yourself a little better along the way, feel free to take the Enneagram personality test! Once you know what your personality type is, let us know how you use Pacemaker and how you think your personality influences your Pacemakerplan customizations! Let’s jump in!

Your Personality- Type 1: The Reformer/Perfectionist

People with Enneagram Type One personalities desire to be perfect in everything they do. From higher matters of morality, to performance at work, to how they spend their personal time, Type Ones want, not just to be good, but to be right as well. Their basic fear is that they are bad or corrupt, so they counter this by seeking to do the best and be the best, oftentimes insisting that those around them measure up to their high standards without fail as well.

Type Ones are sometimes called Reformers because their desire to be good and right drives them to not only encourage others to be good and right, but also to correct entire systems. They are able to sense injustices and imbalances in the world, and they are compelled to try to change them for the better.

They are fastidious, meticulous planners and researchers. And though their vision for a perfect world might be idealistic, that’s pretty much the only idealistic thing about them, as they are incredibly practical, pragmatic people!

For all their integrity and virtue and sincere desire to be right and good, though, Type Ones struggle with an unrelenting, harsh inner critic- a voice inside which tells them that they are not good enough. When very unhealthy, Type Ones throw this inner voice outwardly and can begin seeking out and magnifying the faults of others, and ‘shoulding’ on others continuously- appointing themselves the moral compass of the family, friend group, office etc and constantly telling others what they should and should not do.

In order to live out the embodiment of the perfection they feel driven to be and display, Type Ones end up repressing or stifling feelings and emotions which they feel to be ‘lesser’ or baser, such as anger, desire for play and pleasure, and spontaneity. They then tend to channel these repressed feelings into whatever activity is at hand, making them extremely diligent, but this repression can cause others to experience them as rigid, uptight and critical.

As Peter O’Hanrahan of The Enneagram at Work says, “Their challenge is to balance their critical thinking with acceptance and appreciation, and to know when “good enough” is more productive than “exactly right.””

How it may be affecting your writing process

Just as in other aspects of their day to day lives, Type Ones will bring a desire for absolute perfection to their writing. They will not skimp on detail and will put in the work to ensure that the final product is well researched and written. They are incredibly disciplined and are prepared to do what it takes to get the job done.

When they set themselves a goal and deadline, they not only want to hit the goal by the deadline, but they want the work they produce to be truly stellar. They will likely feel that the plan they’ve created is practical, doable and the only right way to go about it. And although on some level they may believe that there may be multiple roads to success, they would be 100% certain that their way is the one right way. They may truly struggle to see that more than one way could be right.

Pacemaker can help!

The perfect plan in any given situation may only be discernable after the task is done. That is to say, sometimes the perfect plan is not the one you originally devised, but the one you actually did to get to your goal. That’s simply the case because life doesn’t always happen in a neat, linear fashion, much to the chagrin of our Type One friends I’m sure!

Type Ones may benefit greatly from Pacemaker’s ability to adjust automatically to actual work done. The other option allows you to see how far behind or ahead of your original plan you are. And while seeing that they’re ahead of their plan might give Type Ones a real high, seeing that they are behind might be demotivating. Allowing the plan to automatically redistribute the remaining work based on how much work was actually done could communicate to Type Ones that progress is more important that perfection, and that all is not lost because a specific target was not hit.

Pacemaker allows users to really customize their plans using a number of modifiers. Type Ones might be titillated by the degree of granularity with which they can engineer their plans. With Customizations modifiers, Type Ones can go to town on scheduling days to work/not work and determine how much gets done on working days. Display modifiers even let them choose how they’d like to view their plan and results so they are receiving the information visually, just the way they’d like. Other modifiers like the Progress modifier above and the Strategy modifier will give Type Ones even more control over what they see and what they do when it comes to their Pacemakerplan.

Type Ones love order and efficiency, that’s how they see the world and that’s how they organize themselves and their projects. With Pacemaker Premium’s Projects feature, Type Ones can order their various plans together in groups and track progress across all their plans at a glance, in one place! Group them by Month, Year, Genre, Book, or any other way that tickles their fancy! The Checklist feature captures another thing close to the Type One heart- lists! They love making lists, it’s a simple tool that helps them feel organized and on top of things. Pacemaker’s Checklist feature allows for the creation of open-ended and time-fixed checklists, so they can check things off to their Type One heart’s content!

The bottom line for Enneagram Type One Pacemaker users is this: Pacemaker gives you the satisfaction of creating the ‘perfect’ plan, perfectly curated to your availability, workload capacity, display preferences etc. and gives you the flexibility to adjust that plan as life inevitably happens!


Next week we will dive into the personality and possible Pacemaker experience of the Enneagram Type Two: The Helper/Giver. If you’d like to join us on this journey but don’t know what your personality type is, take the test! There are tons of places online where the test can be taken for free, but here’s one we recommend. The key is to be totally honest with your answers. Don’t answer from the perspective of your ideal self, answer truthfully from the perspective of where you are now. Your result should feel eerily accurate and personal!

If you want to just dive into the Types for yourself, you can do so here or here or any of the other thousands of places online where the Enneagram is being shared!

HUGE DISCLAIMER: we are not psychologists or therapists or certified Enneagram Coaches e.t.c., and in no way is anything we write in this series to be taken as medical advice. Any information provided in this series is for informational purposes only!

Become a Pacemaker VIP!

Hi all! In a few weeks we’ll be launching our Pacemaker VIP newsletter! It’ll be a one-stop-shop for all things Pacemaker- exclusive discounts, new features, betas and launches, and blog posts, along with helpful resources from Community members like you!  Becoming a Pacemaker VIP is easy, simply subscribe below!

Perks of being a Pacemaker VIP:

  • Exclusive discounts on existing services and special promotional pricing for new feature launches!
  • Early access to limited seats on beta tests for new tools (along with the ability to directly influence the functionality through discussion groups and feature voting)
  • A platform to share your content with other Pacemaker users. We’ve got the users, you’ve got the content, and we don’t mind being the middle man! We’re always excited to share helpful resources with our users, and Pacemaker VIPs can submit their content for our community feature spots in each issue! (As our list grows, there may even be some ad space, and we’ll keep a few heavily discounted slots exclusively for Pacemaker VIPs)

Get on board! 🙂

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Let’s talk about the Writer’s Games!

You’ve never participated in a writing challenge like this before!

We were recently introduced to a writing group called the Writer’s Workout and once a year they earn the workout in their name by hosting the Writer’s Games! Now this is not your grandmother’s light-walk-after-tea-which-is-good-for-your-constitution kind of workout. OoOoh no. This is the High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) of writing workouts! It’s a high-octane, so-fast-you’ll-miss-it-if-you-blink-or-overthink-it kind of workout!

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For the 4th year in a row, the Writer’s Workout is hosting their annual Writer’s Games- an exciting, fast-paced writing competition designed to challenge you as a writer and help you develop your writing skill! Over the course of 7 weeks, participants will produce 7 short stories in 72 hours. Yes, you read that right! Each week, participants will receive a topic on which they must write, edit and submit a short story within 72 hours!! A panel of judges conducts a blind review of every single entry- feedback which you’ll receive and participants are never pitted against each other as your score is based solely on how well you handle the week’s prompt.  Each winning entry will be featured in the Writer’s Games anthology which will be published and sold later this year- on top of some other great prizes!

There’s even a Team challenge if you’d rather not go it alone!

Registration for the individual Games will run from March 15- April 30 2017, and the Team portion will begin signups in July, so there’s plenty of time for you to get acquainted with the rules of the Games and get signed up!

If you’re looking for fierce but friendly competition, or just need a kick in the pants to get your writing habit going, or going again, sign up for the Writer’s Games!  There’s a real chance you’ll  see your name, IN PRINTTHIS YEAR!

Here’s some important info to keep in mind:

The Who: The Writer’s Workout

The What: The Writer’s Games 2017

The When:

Individual Games Registration: March 15- April 30
Individual Games begin: May 5
Group Games Registration: July 1
Group Games begin: August 4
Anthology published: exact date tbd Fall/Winter 2017!

The How: Visit the Website or Follow the Writer’s Workout and the Writer’s Games on Twitter.

Join for the Games, you might just end up staying for the community!

Let’s talk about VerbalEyze & Writing Toolkits

If you’re between 13 and 22 years of age, or if you know an aspiring young writer in that age range, we have a great resource to share with you. VerbalEyze is a non-profit that exclusively publishes young authors between ages 13 and 22. They can help guide you through the writing and publishing processes. Yes, that’s advising you through licensing agreements, royalties, the editing process, and even marketing and promotion. Not quite ready to publish, but just looking to hone your skills? They help with that too through mini-lessons, writing workshops, a thriving community and a carefully curated list of writing tools to help you!

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Speaking of writing tools, for the month of September, VerbalEyze is hosting a giveaway. The buy-in? Sharing with them @VerbalEyze a list of writing tools you never leave home without! Want to see the tools other writers swear by? Then follow the #MyWritingKit hashtag. Once you’re done browsing, share your favourite writing tools and techniques with the community as well. You may just win yourself some pretty cool prizes for it! There are 10 days left to enter so step on it writers! Find out everything you need to know about this opportunity here.

What better time than the present to light a fire under an aspiring young writer?! And once that fire is lit, why not point them to VerbalEyze- someone who can help stoke it? We’re officially shining a light in their direction and we hope you follow it! Get in touch with them, have a chat. You won’t regret it!