How To Plan For The Unplannable In 2024
In an industry as volatile as the film and TV industry, how can you even plan ahead anymore? Pandemics, strikes and insane weather have made things incredibly unpredictable.
Hi! I’m Manon de Reeper, a horror/genre filmmaker and full-time world traveler. Every two weeks I write about the things I love most: filmmaking, traveling and figuring out how to be an ok human being. Not subscribing yet? Let’s fix that!
Happy new year! We’re not extinct yet which feels like more of a feat every year! Congratulations, friends!
Soooo - the final quarter of 2023 turned out even crazier than expected. We had just gotten the news that the production of my feature film Detain Me had been approved for SAG-AFTRA’s interim agreement, and like a crazy person I flew to Los Angeles as soon as I could. While I was there, the strike finally came to an end.
Great news, but I was also feeling serious whiplash: everyone told us that with the agreement, we got the “golden ticket” - and just like that it was taken away again. Regardless, we are back in the game and I’m so relieved the strike is behind us. 2023 was a whirlwind for everyone in the film industry.
In an industry as volatile as ours, planning ahead is tough. I struggle to plan even two months ahead, not knowing what I’m doing next week, or even where in the world I’ll be living. Good thing the unexpected and I have become good friends!
Setting Yourself Up For Success
For years, a goal on my yearly planning was “sign with a manager”. I never realized the pointlessness of goals like these. I can plan to sign with a manager, but if a manager doesn’t want to sign me, I’m essentially setting myself up for failure. And that’s how I’d feel every time a year had passed by and I still hadn’t signed a manager.
Ironically, the first year I was more mindful about the “controllability” of my goals, and dropped “sign with a manager” from my yearly goals, I signed with a manager just last month! Crazy.
Nowadays, I break up my yearly planning into these sections:
Health
Relationships
Personal growth
Home
Travel
Fun
Career
Career is at the bottom intentionally. In the past I’d only plan for work, until the pandemic forced me to reassess what I was actually doing and how toxic my approach to productivity had become. I was neglecting most of the other categories, especially health and my relationships with family and friends which I sadly didn’t even realize until I couldn’t see them at all.
Moreover, I have more control over the goals in these categories, so working on them helps make me feel less unmoored. Some examples of what’s on my lists for 2024:
In health, go to the dentist and get my broken molar fixed (hello aging) and eat less ultra processed food. In personal growth, a goal is to keep journaling this year (which I started doing in April of 2020). In home, I want to declutter certain spaces on our boat and come up with a custom solution for spice storage. In fun, one of my goals is to be more intentional about the movies I watch (rather mindlessly scrolling through the Netflix library).
They may seem like insignificant goals but they will all have a significant impact on my general wellbeing. That’ll make it easier to work on my bigger projects this year, large parts of which are outside of my control: shooting my feature film Detain Me, and crossing the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean by sailboat.
Goals vs. Intentions
Bringing my feature film to life is a huge project and there’s so overwhelmingly many steps involved, but I continuously try to break things down into smaller tasks that I do have control over.
Same for sailing to the Caribbean this year. We’ve already been working on this massive project for almost a year now - and there’s still quite a bit to be done in prepping our sailboat for this huge undertaking.
Realistically, I know it’s possible that we won’t shoot Detain Me or sail to the Caribbean this year for whatever reasons (zombie apocalypse, solar flare, alien invasion - nothing would surprise me anymore). However, I’m entering 2024 intending for these things to happen and I’m making sure we’re taking all the small steps that will lead us to success should all other external forces come together!
I’ve learned that planning is nothing more than building a framework for intentions, and that’s how I approach planning ahead. Changing my mindset from seeing big projects like these as “goals” to seeing them as “intentions” instead has been a gamechanger for me. With it, I’ve become a lot more resilient to perceived failure: if I don’t succeed on a goal or project this year, at least I’m set up to succeed next year.
My favorite tools
I’m a sucker for productivity tools and I’ve tried so many (it used to be my favorite way of procrastinating, fooling myself into thinking I was still being productive). Here’s the ones I swear by nowadays:
Akiflow - of all the apps for productivity I’ve tried, this is my favorite. It’s got task planning and multi-calendar integration, and a Calendly-like scheduling tool all built in!
Notion - Basically what I use as my Book of Life. I collect everything here.
Milanote - I love making galleries and mind maps on here and I love it for story planning and pre-production.
Airtable - basically Google Sheets/Excel on steroids.
For pen & paper journaling: Leuchtturm notebooks
TWSBI fountain pens with glitter ink to make the writing experience more fabulous because why not!
How do you plan for the year ahead? How do you prepare for the uncontrollable?
And share some of your fave tools while you’re at it!
Things I’ve enjoyed recently:
Movies: Drifting Home, The Killer
Music: From Mars to Sirius - Gojira
Game: Stellaris
Book: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (whew, this is what real genre-bending looks like!)
Join the Crew
This newsletter is written by Manon de Reeper.
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