When I think about productivity, GTD, being organized and blogging, I think about Zen Habits. It is the best written blog about all of the above (and more) topics. No surprises it won the award as Best Overall Blog in 2007.

I am one of the thousands fan of Leo Babauta, its editor, who has accomplished a lot in life and shares daily tips on how to tackle stress and life.

I decided to interview Leo and ask him how we could become ‘Zen Event Managers’. He demonstrated to be a great individual and with amazing kindness replied to my questions.

- Multitasking is said to be one of the most critical quality of an event manager. Do you agree?

While it is useful to be able to multitask when necessary, I don’t think it should be your main mode of working. For me, at least, learning to single-task — to focus on one task at a time and block out all distractions — has been the key to being more productive, to getting important things done (as opposed to a lot of unimportant things), to reducing stress, to simplifying my work life. It’s a more important skill in the long run.

- Managing events raises stress levels to rooftop. What would you suggest to deal with this daily nightmare.

Simplify things as much as possible. Take a look at everything you do (make a long list) and decide which ones are most crucial. Then streamline things so that you get rid of the unessential. You might not get everything done, but you’ll be less stressed and you’ll get the essential things done.

- Our desks are full of projects, programs and PC monitors, how should we cope with this clutter?

Declutter. Get rid of everything you don’t absolutely need. Then set up a system where you keep things in one place instead of all over the place, and stick to the system. See my Zen To Done (ZTD) system for more info.

- We are often convinced that working more actually delivers better results, do you agree?

No, not at all. What is important is doing the essential tasks that get you to the accomplishments you want, not doing a lot of busywork. If you can do 3 important things in 4 hours, rather than 20 non-important things in 10 hours, you’re more productive and more efficient. And less stressed. Learn to eliminate the non-essential.

- To become ‘Zen Event Managers’, the first thing we should change is…

Learn to focus on the important, and to eliminate distractions.

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Events are about details. If you don’t pay attention to details I strongly suggest you pursue another career path, or alternatively read below.

If you are convinced that details are indeed a priority I strongly suggest you think about using a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) to manage your next event.

Project managers use WBS to break down projects in smaller parts. By doing so they can define what needs to be done to get from the idea of a project to the actual project. A WBS also helps you in assigning tasks to team members as well as resources.

All the above is pretty straightforward. What I want you to consider is the hidden benefit of coming up with a focused WBS.

By breaking down to a fair amount of detail you’ll be able to think about details. Wait a minute didn’t I suggest you few lines ago to get a new job, you superficial planner?

Well maybe you got a chance.

What we’ve seen is that by using a WBS you can actually identify details.

The trick is that is you can think of new ways to add value to that particular detail.

Think about a conference where a WBS task is to buy presents for speakers.

Your question should now be: how can I add value? What would make that present unforgettable? This will help you in approaching the task creatively.

See, you are thinking about details now.

I have to admit I was the least detail person you will ever meet in your life. Such technique has allowed me to:

- identify the details of a given event

- make those details unforgettable

At the end of the day what you are managing is a sum of details. Never forget that.

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Lately I have been having a great conversation with few of you on what were the top 5 qualities of the successful event manager. Although not in the Top 5, a lot of you named multitasking.

I agree. Even if you are involved with planning a dinner with friends, tasks will include collecting RSVPs, arranging food and drinks, selecting the music for the night, etc,. Most of the times you will find yourself doing few of the above at the same time.

If you work with events you have to multiply that by a hundred.

Nonetheless, I have to admit that in the back of my mind I am not 100% sure that I am being productive when holding 2 phones, replying to an email and making online payments at the same time.

Therefore, I went out and did some research about this interesting subject.

WebMd explains that

…we consistently perform better and faster when tasks are done successively, rather than all at once

That hurts right, looks like awful truth though.

Bad news are not over…

I kept researching and stumbled upon the difference between multitasking and continuous partial attention as per the article of the Huffington Post

Continuous partial attention and multi-tasking are two different attention strategies, motivated by different impulses. When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. Each activity has the same priority - we eat lunch AND file papers. [...] In the case of continuous partial attention, we’re motivated by a desire not to miss anything. There’s a kind of vigilance that is not characteristic of multi-tasking.

Ouch…

The New York Times tells us that multitasking decreases our productivity and it shares some tips as well:

Check e-mail messages once an hour, at most. Listening to soothing background music while studying may improve concentration. But other distractions - most songs with lyrics, instant messaging, television shows - hamper performance. Driving while talking on a cellphone, even with a hands-free headset, is a bad idea.

What about you? Are you still convinced to define yourself as multitasker in your resume?

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It is one of the most adopted and therefore definitely worth a review and interview with its Director of Marketing, Jack Mardack.

How does it work?

Few things that I love about the service:

- There is no standard price. They earn a percentage based on your ticket price.
- It’s customizable. You can pretty much input as many details as you prefer. The event page is greatly adaptable and here are few examples.

Alumni Meeting

Fundraising Event

Social Meeting

- Online secure payment. If you don’t work regularly with events this might be a bit of an hassle to set up. Great tool.
- Affiliate Program. A brand new program where you can promote events and earn up to 35% commission (If you blog about events and have ads you might want to consider this instead of random text ads)
- Tagging, personalized URL, RSS. Welcome to Web 2.0, finally some fresh air.
- Promotion. Eventbrite immediately indexes the event with major search engines. This usually takes forever if you don’t have an updated platform up and running.
- Survey, etc. There are few more you can check them out here

I decided to ask a few questions to Jack Mardack, who was very kind and answered as follows:

What is the idea behind Eventbrite?

Eventbrite is a self-service event registration and online ticketing platform. The idea behind Eventbrite is to empower individuals, companies and organizations of all sizes with the tools they need to successfully promote and sell-out their events on the Web.

What’s in it for event managers?

If you are someone who is already tasked with managing events and selling tickets, Eventbrite can make your life a lot easier and make you more successful. We give the event manager control over the entire process, from pre-event marketing, to registration, to ticket sales, and even give them powerful customer relationship management tools they can use to market future events or promote other products and services.

What’s in it for Average Joe?

What’s in it for the Average Joe is the ability to go from being an Average Joe to being a successful event manager in about 5 minutes. See previous answer. We’ve worked hard to make our tools as easy to use as they are powerful. The result is that everyday people, from all walks of life, are using Eventbrite to promote and sell-out events of every conceivable type and size.

What’s in Eventbrite’s future?

We’re committed to continuing to enrich our features and to making Eventbrite even more powerful. The future is we will remain focused on providing event managers with everything they need to succeed, and on making it as easy as possible for anyone to make their event a success. What we see for the industry is that many more individuals and organizations are going to become event organizers. This is going to produce an incredible number and diversity of events, many of which are going to try to find their audiences on the Web. It’s going to be a really long tail, and Eventbrite will be there for all of them.

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It is crucial that everything is at the right place and everyone knows what to do.

The self made bride who does not want to use any wedding planning service should know that planning well is 90% of the job. The rest is luck.

In order to reduce your risk I suggest you use the following template. You can print it on a large paper and post it to your wall. It will help to scheme things out and sort them in packages of activities.

It is a Work Breakdown Structure. I invite you to read more on WBS so you could think of assigning tasks and give them a chronological value.

Enjoy it.

Download the wedding-work-breakdown-structure.pdf

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What is Openproj?

As for its website

“OpenProj is a free, open-source desktop alternative to Microsoft Project. OpenProj has been downloaded over 150,000 times in the first weeks since it was released and has quickly become one of the most popular open-source applications.”

Now, you can believe me when I tell you I am a busy person and I got no time to waste. I can tell you this software is extremely easy to learn, even if you have no previous experience with project management software. It is a clone of Microsoft Project and it is very intuitive.

Hopefully I convinced you by now. So what you need to do is downloading your free copy of Openproj here. If you’re on Windows download the .zip file, for you Linux mates out there I don’t think you need explanations, just select your platform.

Now you need to download the event template I’ve prepared for you to enjoy. You can find it here.

Now let’s have a look at what you’ll find in the file.

In the starting screen you can edit this column according to your needs. I must say this list is very comprehensive. It has been conceived with two purposes:

- Giving you budget Items to think about

- Clearing the path to create a comprehensive WBS

On the right hand side you can see the Gantt outline which has a preset time interval of 1 day between every item. You can modify that according to your needs and estimates. Very easy to use…

By clicking on the fourth little box on the right you can decide everything about people working in the project. You got cost per hour, emails and you can divide them in groups of competency.

You can also add machinery cost, even though we don’t really need this feature for events.

This section will allow you to easily allocate resources to tasks and then it will automatically compute costs which will appear in your budget…awesome. Change this section according to your needs.

You also got on the sixth little box an automatic WBS… again super easy.

I’ll let you explore the rest of it.

If you have any question either comment on this post or mail me (address on the right column)

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I previously posted on how to make a Gantt chart, nonetheless I found also few videos on Youtube on how to create one in the easy to use Excel (pretty similar for those using Calc):


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If you use the Gantt chart macro of Excel you should take a look at this:

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If you are using Excel 2007 this is for you:

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I also bumped into a couple of tutorials for dotProject which I think is a great, easy to use open-source software and most of all is free:

#1

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#2

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I must say there isn’t much out there in terms of video tutorials. Should you guys find anything worth publishing, please comment on this post.

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Coming up with a correct WBS could be a delicate task and that is why I felt there was the need for more examples. This post shows more WBS examples for different occasions.

This example goes through the planning and the operational phases.

This one is very useful to organize expenses on a budget

Where to budget on WBS Levels

This example shows the promotional tour of a book

This is about promotion and selling requirements and here its relevant Gantt

The first level of a music festival, the second level , the third level and the Gantt chart of the event

Getting Things Done is David Allen simplification of project management applied to everyday life. The process in itself is a Work Breakdown Structure that simplifies process. Here a nice wallpaper that explains the process or a summary of it.

Hopes this helps.

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I previously posted on Microsoft Office Templates for Gantt. Let’s have a look at one of them.

Gantt Template for Marketing Event Planning and Execution

Let’s see….Highlighted in red we have task names, When defining our WBS, we’ve identified packages of activities. That’s where the name of the activities will go.

Highlighted in blue we have duration. Now if you’ve listened to the podcasts I pointed out previously, you should be aware that every task has a duration. There are various ways to assign duration to a task. Some techniques are quite specific and extensive. For small events I’d suggest to rely on common sense, previous experience or talk to team members accountable for specific areas (which are indicated in the Resource Names section).

As you’d understand coming up with time weight is a very enjoyable practice in that it gives us the total time required to develop a specific project (highlighted in green). Both you and your boss will be happy about that because you finally have deadlines!

The light magenta part of the screen shows us the very useful part of Gantt. On this side we can see graphically organised tasks according to a calendar. The black lines show us summary of the entire activities and most of all their sequence. It’s complicated to collect speakers from the airport if we haven’t contacted them in the firs place. Gantt imports the logical sequence of WBS, PERT and CPM and shows it graphically.

This is an overview of what a Gantt Chart does. Now let’s scroll to screenshots of this particular Gantt chart, as we can get useful tips on what to consider in designing an event. I invite you to have a look at the tips section to get more items for your event.

Define and plan the Event

Speakers

Venue

Printing

Registration

AV Equipment

PR

Giveaways

Shipping Event Material

Event Day

Measure Event

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Here is a collection of WBS samples. I tried to search for those that apply to most event management scenarios.

Conference 1


Conference 2 (via UTS)

Project Management Process (via Cornell)

A Baloon Festival

Team Management (via Spotty dog)

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