Manifest by Lily Kwok

25/02/2022

🤦‍♀️

25/01/2022

Grateful for this testimonial from a recent client. ✨

17/12/2021

😬

01/12/2021

Career Opportunities in the T&T Public Sector

Learn more here:

Public Sector Vacancies CAREER OPPORTUNITY Applications are invited by suitably qualified nationals of Trinidad and Tobago for the following vacancies at the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and the Arts: Database Specialist Cultural Adviser Senior Corporate Communications Officer Administrative Direct...

17/11/2021

*taps mic* 🎤

Hi, it’s been a while… but I am here, today, alive and well (mostly). And I felt the call to post on Manifest. Despite all the tragic things that have happened to me recently, I feel blessed + privileged to continue to have this space, to welcome new clients as they come, and to take time away to focus on other priorities and professional + life goals.

Manifest is my ‘side hustle’ (as the girl bosses say), and 2020 taught me the value of multiple streams of income when it feels like the world is collapsing in on itself. Yet… I envision one day that Manifest could possibly be more than a ‘side’, a possible ‘main’, where I could pour my energy into doing something I truly love – crafting strings of words to translate our intents in the best possible way. This possibility awaits.

Manifest started as a CV/resume consultation service, and the majority of my clients still approach me for assistance with job application materials. Since then, I’ve opened up myself to editing and proofreading of various types of work (from short stories to essays for translation competitions), and I have come to realize that I find personal joy in working with longer-form text, both creative and technical. I believe this to be rooted in my background in literature, linguistics, academia, and digital content creation, as well as living in a bilingual household where I constantly wrestle to find the right phrases and thriving in a diverse country like Trinidad and Tobago, where I get to dance between Standard English and Trinidadian Creole every day.

If you have arrived at the end of this semi-love letter to myself and my work, I hope you are well. I hope the darkness of these times has not robbed you of your willingness to continue. You are loved, and you are welcomed to my inbox if you are manifesting something, small or big. I await. ❤️

04/09/2021

Thursday thoughts

31/08/2021

"If you’re a professor, or a mid-level executive, or a freelance consultant, you don’t have a supervisor handing you a detailed work order for the day. Instead, you’re likely bombarded with requests and questions and opportunities and invites that you try your best to triage. How do you decide when to say no? In the modern office context, stress has become a default heuristic. If you turn down a Zoom-meeting invitation, there’s a social-capital cost, as you’re causing some mild harm to a colleague and potentially signalling yourself to be uncoöperative or a loafer. But, if you feel sufficiently stressed about your workload, this cost might become acceptable: you feel confident that you are “busy,” and this provides psychological cover to skip the Zoom. The problem with the stress heuristic is that it doesn’t start reducing your workload until you already have too much to do."

In the modern office, stress has become a default metric for judging whether we are busy enough.

27/08/2021

❤️

23/08/2021

✨ BOOKINGS OPEN! ✨

However, due to growing responsibilities in other areas of my professional & personal life, I will be accepting clients on a limited basis. I want to ensure that I'm giving 100% to each of my clients! This means taking on fewer clients and being more selective in who I work with. Thank you for understanding!

📧 Please contact me via e-mail ONLY to ensure a timely response: [email protected]

🚫 No DMs/Facebook messages

17/08/2021

Do you relate? 💭

"A study, published in 2019, looked at long-term trends in the health of a group of nearly five thousand Swedish workers. They found that repeated exposure to “high information and communication technology demands” (translation: a need to be constantly connected) were associated with “suboptimal” health outcomes. This trend persisted even after they adjusted the statistics for potential complicating factors such as age, s*x, socioeconomic status, health behavior, body-mass index, job strain, and social support. Of course, we don’t really need data to capture something that so many of us feel intuitively. I recently surveyed the readers of my blog about e-mail. “It’s slow and very frustrating. . . . I often feel like email is impersonal and a waste of time,” one respondent said. “I’m frazzled—just keeping up,” another admitted. Some went further. “I feel an almost uncontrollable need to stop what I’m doing to check email,” one person reported. “It makes me very depressed, anxious and frustrated.”"

In an attempt to work more effectively, we’ve accidentally deployed an inhumane way to collaborate.

21/07/2021

Whenever someone tells me that they're interested in doing a Master's degree, I usually push them with a series of questions to seriously consider if pursuing post-graduate education is truly a worthwhile investment. Why do you want to do this Master's programme? What are the expected gains after graduation? Will this advance your career, increase your pay, or lead you onto a new professional path?

Compared to undergraduate and doctoral programmes, Master's tend to have less funding/financial aid opportunities. As such, they're a huge financial responsibility to take on (with often little return on investment). It's important to weigh the pros & cons before taking the plunge!

The article below primarily focuses on the U.S. and, of course, dives into online Master's programmes and those run by for-profit organizations (something that has been on the rise in the past couple of years). What are your thoughts?

And elite universities deserve a huge share of the blame.

17/07/2021

😳