managernim's new strategy
"if not, then..."
For some time now I have joked about being my own ‘managernim’—a manager who takes care of a celebrity like a K-pop idol. My managernim self is responsible for my schedule, keeping track of my obligations, and thinking about my best interests over the long-term, planning ahead and writing down everything I’d like to achieve. My ‘idol’ self is responsible for following these schedule and plans and putting my best foot forward so I make the best impression possible.
Neither job is easy, because both Managernim Kirsten and Idol Kirsten have to grapple with Sloth Kirsten. And when I say “sloth”, I don’t mean one of the seven deadly sins; I mean the slow-moving animal. Sloth Kirsten isn’t wilfully unmotivated or lazy. Sloth Kirsten is actually a nice girl who really wants to be a team player; she just needs time to psych herself up before she can make decisions or perform a series of tasks that require mental and emotional intelligence. Unfortunately this means that Sloth Kirsten will wake up two hours before an appointment and proceed to scroll mindlessly on Instagram for an hour and forty-five minutes, until she’s almost late and has to run out the door on an empty stomach again.
It’s taken awhile but I think I’m getting the hang of these three sometimes aligned, sometimes opposed selves. I’m working out what I need to make it work: structure and direction, but also some flow and spontaneity. The key is to make plans but not feel too wedded to them.
Every day, I look at my calendar and to-do list (it helps that I’m also addicted to playing with productivity apps) and plan out what I’d like to do over the next few days. I review events and appointments and schedule tasks around them, so I know what needs to get done each day. I need to do that, because if I wake up in the morning without there already being a plan for the day, I’ll end up spending even more time in bed, unable to make myself move until I know what to do with myself.
So far, so good. That’s the bit that I’ve known about myself for years. The newer part, though, is realising that it’s okay, that it can actually work out, if I don’t follow that plan in the end. If I start an hour earlier or (more likely) two hours later than the original schedule said. If I decide that it wasn’t a good day to do a particular thing on the list after all. If I decide that maybe there’s something else that I want to do instead. Or even if I decide that maybe it’s not going to be a very good day and I’m really only going to be able to complete 20% of what I’d hoped to get done.
This is Managernim’s new “if not, then…” strategy. The idol is booked and busy, but also a little temperamental. Sometimes gigs take longer than expected, sometimes they get cancelled, sometimes they get moved around. Sometimes the idol’s not in a great condition and has to lie down or sit something out completely. That’s okay. Managernim is experienced and able to roll with the punches. Managernim will sort shit out as things develop.
P is for ‘Professional’. But P is also for ‘Playing by ear’.
I guess I used to assume that productivity and responsibility can only come from powering through. Now I’ve realised that productivity, particularly of the more sustained variety, can come from respecting and working with energy and motivation levels instead of forcing things to happen. These days I edit and shift my schedule as I go through my day—sometimes I edit or schedule tasks even after I’ve done them, to make the calendar I look back on at the end of the day better match what I actually did. This way, when I look back, I focus on all the things I have done instead of all the things I failed to do. And then I don’t feel like shit. And when I don’t feel like shit, it’s easier to get myself moving and get stuff done.
Why the heck did it take me so long to discover such a simple hack? Someone give Managernim a raise!
Separately, I’ve also been Tamagotchi-ing myself a little bit, just to give myself an extra nudge to do some little things for tiny bits of dopamine. I’m coming up to 100 days on Finch, which is a self-care app where you’re raising a little birb who goes on adventures and makes discoveries. You get gems with every goal that you achieve, and you can use these gems to buy the little birb clothes and accessories and furniture for his/her/their little birb room and go on trips to places like Sydney and Paris and Taipei and Tokyo and Paro.
I didn’t last very long the first time I used Finch, because I made the mistake of trying to use it as a regular task manager and overloaded it with all the work tasks I had to do each day. This time, I keep it to the nice, gentle self-care stuff. The goals are simple and achievable. Some are so simple—”brush teeth”, “shower”, “listen to a song that puts you in a good mood”—that it kind of feels like cheating because zero effort is required and they were things that I would have been doing anyway. Others are slightly less entrenched in my usual routines, but still very easy to achieve: “plank for 10 seconds”, “eat a vitamin”. I’ve realised that the point of Finch is not to challenge myself as if it’s some sort of mock exam for life—it’s about celebrating some of the little things and letting myself feel good about what I can do each day rather than what I want to push myself to do. Life doesn’t have to be so hard all the time, and now my little birb is doing all right.