How To Stay Productive While Planning a Big Event
If you’re an events professional looking for advice on how to stay productive, you’ll probably notice that most articles on the subject seem desperate to boil it down to a handful of snappy pointers, usually focussed on keeping organised, rigidly taking notes or timetabling your day. This is a simplification — and misleading too — because some people find it naturally difficult to work in this way.
For many professionals, working in what some of us might call ‘chaos’ actually helps them, keeping them occupied and on their toes. So, we’re going to offer a few tips on how to stay productive when planning your event without all these unrealistic expectations of efficiency and organisation.
Set your targets
Planning an event might mean you’re responsible to clients or supervisors. However, it’s vital to set your own standards of productivity, rather than have them dictated to you. Equally, it’s important not to look for a one-size fits all solution. By measuring your expectations and not expecting an immediate transformation into an ultra-productive whizz, you’ll be able to make incremental changes to your working behaviour, and ultimately cut out bad practices.
The New York Times puts this down to three basic principles of productivity:
- Trust the small increments
- Be accountable
- Forgive yourself
By following these principles, you can remind yourself to manage your expectations. Raising your productivity, while obviously a good thing, has to be done in a way that suits your style of working.
Break up big tasks into small ones
A big event requires extensive planning, so making lists and ticking off tasks as they go might be a very useful way of keeping on top of things. It’s useful if it helps you to compartmentalise your work, and might help to keep you focussed on your next step. This is particularly important for an event planner with only a limited time to work with. But if you end up getting distracted writing the list, or if you stay on one task too long to avoid moving on to the next one, then you’ll need to take a different approach.
There is some benefit to compartmentalising, however. Separating out your tasks to focus on only one at a time can streamline your productivity. But what about the multitaskers? Well, the science suggests multitasking is, for the most part, impossible. Multitaskers tend to make more mistakes, constantly backtrack, and are less creative. Our advice is to stay focussed and engaged with the task at hand, rather than trying to get everything done at once. This is certainly something that organising an event can benefit from: when careful planning is key, it can hurt your event and upset your clients if you’ve made sloppy errors by putting too much on your plate.
Take breaks
If you are getting caught up in too many tasks, the best thing to do might be to take a break. This is something that applies to everyone. Of course, some of you might like to power through your work, not stopping until you’ve got everything finished and out of the way.
That’s fine, to an extent, but even a seasoned multitasker can experience burnout or fatigue. Everyone benefits from time to recharge and take stock, even for no more than ten minutes. Plan a long holiday if it helps: you can spend time away from your desk doing something you enjoy, and come back refreshed and inspired. It has been shown that taking extended breaks and working less actually improve productivity, so make sure to take time off when you can.
Make good use of technology
An often-forgotten point is that, in a world in which work overwhelmingly takes place on computers, too much technology can actually be a big barrier to productivity. Being online all week means you’re being flooded with emails, and if you’re someone who is easily distracted anyway, having constant access to the internet might make staying focussed difficult. This can also apply to your mobile phones — perhaps it’s time to keep them switched off?
Instead of making technology a barrier to productivity, you can make good use of technology by using an event management software. This is where services like Eventogy come in handy. Its elegant CRM acts as a communications hub, thereby allowing events managers to send emails, status updates and push notifications from one page while helping you to manage your attendee data. Eventogy can actually serve to remove distractions and help you stay on task. By streamlining the process of organising an event, Eventogy can actually serve to remove distractions and help you stay on task.
Ultimately, there isn’t a one-size-fits-alls formula for productivity. In fact, the key is to try different methods to find what personally motivates you and suits your style of work. We can keep telling you not to multitask, but if you genuinely feel like this is the best way to stay effective and productive, who are we to stop you?
Productivity depends on your perspective, too. If you feel like you’re already working to your limit, then don’t push yourself further to the point of stress. Event planning is one of the most stressful jobs around, so managing expectations might be easier said than done. However, being your own biggest critic won’t help anyone; the best way to stay productive will always start with managing and meeting your own standards and goals.
