Why Scheduling Should Come As Second Nature To Event Planners

Running an event isn’t exactly a cakewalk. You’ve got to manage teams of diverse individuals, work out your event’s itinerary, organize guest speakers and keynotes, meet with clients, vendors and suppliers…you get the idea. It’s sort of a logistical nightmare. Worse still, all this stuff needs to be tackled in addition to everything that’s going on in your own life.

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It sort of goes without saying that you need formidable organizational skills (not to mention a cool head) in order to survive. You need to know how to effectively manage and divide your time – because if you don’t, you’re going to crash and burn. Don’t worry, it’s not as difficult as you might think.

How You Can Be Better At Scheduling (Even If You’re Bad At It)

Now, it’s worth noting at this point that even if you aren’t the sort of person who can put together a schedule in the blink of an eye, you aren’t without hope as an event planner. There are certain tricks and tips that can help you keep things more in order in your own life. Let’s talk about them.

First and foremost, it’s important that you understand exactly what you need to get done – and how long it’ll take you to do it. Make a checklist, and include a note regarding the deadline for each project and an estimate of how long it’ll take you to finish. It sort of goes without saying here that you need a great deal of self-knowledge in order to figure all this out.

Once you’ve an idea of your deadlines, your next step is to figure out when you’re going to work. Oddly enough, this is where most people – myself included – tend to utterly fail. We set plenty of deadlines for ourselves, but we never actually zero in on the process that’s involved in working towards them. By focusing on the work rather than the end goal, it’s actually a lot easier to get stuff done – and that’s something that I believe most veteran event planners understand.

Last but certainly not least, you’ve got to be willing to take command of your surroundings. I’m talking about your team, your venue, your partners, your guests; everything. See, successful scheduling is more about initiative than anything else – if you’re willing to put in the work, it’s not anywhere near as hard as you’d expect.

Relaxation And Its Role In Taking Initiative

There’s one last thing we need to talk about before we wrap things up – and this is another area where a lot of people fail spectacularly.  You need to give yourself time to relax. Schedule frequent breaks based on how often you think you’ll need to step back from your work, and stick to them. I’ve mentioned before the importance of relaxation; you need to take that into account when you’re creating a schedule for yourself.

Running an event isn’t easy. Quite the contrary, actually; it’s a logistical nightmare of scheduling conflicts and mountains of work. There’s a reason so many event planners seem so in-command of their lives – they have to be in order to do their jobs. Thankfully, you can be just as in-command as they are; it’s ultimately just a matter of making the effort to do so.