Managing Life as a Large System
Written by: Xeros
First Written: September 26, 2021
Last Edited: January 19, 2022
Original Post (Discord, link unavailable)
First Written: September 26, 2021
Last Edited: January 19, 2022
Original Post (Discord, link unavailable)
Content Warnings:
- N/A
I’m going to go on a rant about how we manage as a large system here, for a second. It might be useful to someone. This was originally a discord post, so it’s a little disjointed.
We have a google doc with info about every headmate, from gender to species to height to pronouns to alterhuman identities. Everything you’d need to remember, just in case things get mixed up–specifically, people tend to forget their sexualities and need to rediscover them sometimes due to the sheer amount of people in here and the brain’s general forgetfulness due to ADHD issues. We have never forgotten anyone’s species or anything like that but we write it down just in case.
We list similar information on our system website as well as information about how our layers function and other general system info we don’t mind being public.
We also have multiple (due to the channel limit) private discord servers just for us to:
For inner-management and having the system be generally happy, we have 5 hosts who generally cover every large friend group in the system. The smaller groups are covered by the larger groups because people tend to be friends with more than one group, or depending on the group, the people in the smaller groups never want to interact with the front so they don’t need to make body decisions. The hosts obviously front a lot but the inner-management is important too. If people want certain things, changes, or something like that, there’s usually someone nearby that they already know who is in control of the body’s life that they can bring things up with.
We also track moods on this app called Daylio, where we can set system members apart from each other by listing them as “activities” and that keeps a general idea of who is feeling what way and how we can make it so that we’re all getting what we need. When someone shows up near front, we ask themselves to put themselves into the app with how they’re feeling so we can track when they’ve last been near the front as well as how they feel generally.
For front time, we don’t really schedule things (we definitely should), but we keep an eye on the frontpercent on pluralkit and if anyone who usually fronts a lot hasn’t fronted for a while or has a low percent, we let them. We also generally let new people in the front if they want to interact with the outside once they settle in. Birthdays and such automatically give fronting rights for that day, so everyone who wants to front can front on their birthdays. If there’s double-ups on birthdays, one person goes the day before or the day after if they both want to front.
In short, it’s a lot of file keeping, organising and communication that’s generally needed to have a big system like this.
We have a google doc with info about every headmate, from gender to species to height to pronouns to alterhuman identities. Everything you’d need to remember, just in case things get mixed up–specifically, people tend to forget their sexualities and need to rediscover them sometimes due to the sheer amount of people in here and the brain’s general forgetfulness due to ADHD issues. We have never forgotten anyone’s species or anything like that but we write it down just in case.
We list similar information on our system website as well as information about how our layers function and other general system info we don’t mind being public.
We also have multiple (due to the channel limit) private discord servers just for us to:
- Write things down that we need to remember amongst ourselves.
- Talk to each other in text if it’s a bad communication day.
- Do pluralkit things.
- Store images, written down memories (exomemories we’d probably forget) and such related to each headmate in individual channels for each of us.
For inner-management and having the system be generally happy, we have 5 hosts who generally cover every large friend group in the system. The smaller groups are covered by the larger groups because people tend to be friends with more than one group, or depending on the group, the people in the smaller groups never want to interact with the front so they don’t need to make body decisions. The hosts obviously front a lot but the inner-management is important too. If people want certain things, changes, or something like that, there’s usually someone nearby that they already know who is in control of the body’s life that they can bring things up with.
We also track moods on this app called Daylio, where we can set system members apart from each other by listing them as “activities” and that keeps a general idea of who is feeling what way and how we can make it so that we’re all getting what we need. When someone shows up near front, we ask themselves to put themselves into the app with how they’re feeling so we can track when they’ve last been near the front as well as how they feel generally.
For front time, we don’t really schedule things (we definitely should), but we keep an eye on the frontpercent on pluralkit and if anyone who usually fronts a lot hasn’t fronted for a while or has a low percent, we let them. We also generally let new people in the front if they want to interact with the outside once they settle in. Birthdays and such automatically give fronting rights for that day, so everyone who wants to front can front on their birthdays. If there’s double-ups on birthdays, one person goes the day before or the day after if they both want to front.
In short, it’s a lot of file keeping, organising and communication that’s generally needed to have a big system like this.