Don’t get lost in the chaos of it all. Planning multiple events at once can wear you down before you know it. Follow these four steps to help you better manage the chaos of planning multiple events at once.
Step 1: Prioritize Your Time and Work
Organize your time and your thoughts. We know everything you are doing is time sensitive, so create two lists for your most urgent and most important things to do. Include the time it should take to complete each task to help you get an idea of how much time you need to get everything done (and how much caffeine you may need). Leave a little extra time in your day to eat that monte-cristo sandwich you’ve been thinking about when you’re at the gym, save 20 minutes for randomly checking your social media when you lose focus and prepare for any last minute tasks that may come up. Once you’ve made a list of what you need to do, try grouping tasks together. Leveraging the little time you have to complete two things at once can take a little extra time in that moment, but you will be thanking yourself later.
Pro tip: It’s important to know when to move on. Spend more time on things that will provide the most value for your event attendees or for yourself.
Step 2: Tidy Up Your Workspace
It’s time to Marie Kondo your workspace.
Start by deciding what you want from your space. Whether you are trying to promote your creativity, create a comfy space your dog can relax in or feng shui your space to the fullest, do what makes you most productive and happy to come back every day. Separate all your books, papers, miscellaneous items and sentimental things. Take a moment to pick up each item and decide what makes you feel good and lets you do your job well (this includes sifting through the stack of papers you haven’t looked at since your boss handed them to you three months ago).
Now it’s time to put everything back in order! Make sure you can visually see all the items on your desk and in your drawers when you open them. Take a moment to thank all the items you choose to discard from your workspace. A Harvard study showed giving thanks can make you happier (even happier than your workspace finally being organized), not to mention those items served a purpose at some point.
Bringing the KonMari method from your home and into your workspace will help reduce your stress and help you handle your events like a pro.
Step 3: Minimize last minute changes
Set reasonable deadlines that acknowledge your actual bandwidth and leave room for mishaps along the way. Assuming everything is going to go according to plan is one of the most common ways those last minute changes turning into major hiccups. The stress you can cause for yourself without proper planning isn’t good for your forehead wrinkles or the impacts it may have on your event (it’s nice to dream, but everything going exactly as planned is probably not in your tarot cards).
Use online management tools such as Events.com (shameless plug) to help you stay organized in the digital space and make planning your event so much easier.
Mistakes are bound to happen, but planning for them can save you time and stress. Here are five more mistakes event planners make that you should consider and how to avoid them.
Step 4: Ask for Help and Feedback
You’ve gotten this far in the event planning process and you’ve probably met some new people along the way. Use their experiences of past successes and failures to help make your event even better.
If you need some help, it is okay to ask! Make sure you know what to ask from the people you are asking. Even though your second grade teacher always said there is no such thing as stupid questions, they were kind of wrong. If you don’t know the answer to something, Google it first. Google can (and should) be your best friend throughout your event planning process and has the answers to a lot of your questions. Once it’s time to turn to someone for help, have a clear focus on what you are asking from them. Ask people you know you can trust.
Setting up an open flow of communication between you and everyone involved will let everything run more smoothly.
Now that you know our top 4 tips and tricks to help manage the chaos of planning multiple events at once, start planning your next event(s) on Events.com.
