{"id":4192,"date":"2016-01-27T12:22:13","date_gmt":"2016-01-27T17:22:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/?p=4192"},"modified":"2016-01-27T12:22:13","modified_gmt":"2016-01-27T17:22:13","slug":"event-planning-rule-5-write-things-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wrote-about\/event-planning-rule-5-write-things-down\/","title":{"rendered":"Event Planning Rule 5 &#8211; Write Things Down"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Rule 5. Write things down. (You think you can remember everything. Right up until you can&#8217;t.)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Every event has some details I need to remember. I started out thinking I would always know have them at hand. But the more events I ran and the busier I got, I was forgetting things. Every event is the sum of its parts.<\/p>\n<h3>The Parts<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Event Date<\/li>\n<li>Event Time<\/li>\n<li>Local or Remote Event<\/li>\n<li>If local, room number<\/li>\n<li>Which account was hosting the event? (Of the four WebEx accounts I had)<\/li>\n<li>Phone number for teleconference<\/li>\n<li>Host Access Code<\/li>\n<li>Participant Access Code<\/li>\n<li>Closed Captioning link (optional)<\/li>\n<li>Is the event being recorded?<\/li>\n<li>Are we using a webcam?<\/li>\n<li>Are we including remote video?<\/li>\n<li>Is there a slide deck? (Do I have it?)<\/li>\n<li>Is there any video or audio content? (Did we test it?)<\/li>\n<li>Will there be a Question and Answer session?<\/li>\n<li>How will remote participants ask questions?<\/li>\n<li>Is anyone from senior leadership going to attend?<\/li>\n<li>Is this event open to the public or agency-only?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I had to remember everything I needed to run the event successfully and answer questions the organizers would ask as we were starting. I also needed to work around any late changes or additions. Which included saying no to people who weren&#8217;t usually told no. (Which is a whole different topic in itself.)<\/p>\n<h3>Writing Is Remembering<\/h3>\n<p>I always carry a pocket notebook for any note-taking on the fly. But I also kept an event notebook with pages dedicated to the current events I plan. And yes, there was always more than one. Sometimes in the same day I&#8217;d have three or four to manage. From running the meeting to starting and handing it off, each event needed time and attention.<\/p>\n<p>I also make good use of Post-It Notes. They were easy to keep phone numbers and codes on. I could jot down which camera angles I had preset to this particular event. I could write notes to people helping me. Those little sticky notes are a vital part of my work.<\/p>\n<p>When I forgot something, the event suffered. If I needed a webcam and didn&#8217;t have it we&#8217;d have no live video. If we needed closed captioning for a transcript or reasonable accommodation and I didn&#8217;t book it, someone who needed it wouldn&#8217;t be able to enjoy the event.<\/p>\n<h3>Memory Fails<\/h3>\n<p>It&#8217;s easy to trick yourself into thinking you&#8217;ll remember anything. I won&#8217;t forget the phone number. I will remember to make the change you asked about as I was leaving my desk? Sure, I&#8217;ll take care of that edit to your slides and fix that typo?<\/p>\n<p>But I won&#8217;t. I&#8217;ve forgotten to fix your typo on every version of the slides we used. I forgot you were going to have someone else speak mid-way through the event. I didn&#8217;t remember to book closed captioning despite you requesting it. Were we recording this event? The last thing I have in my notes was wrong. I&#8217;m sorry.<\/p>\n<p>Memory is fallible. I write everything down I want to get right. And I want to get it all right. I want to get it right every time. I&#8217;ve talked about <a href=\"http:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wrote-about\/event-planning-rule-3-be-ready-to-fail\/\">all the ways you can fail<\/a>. I don&#8217;t want to be the source of failure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rule 5. Write things down. (You think you can remember everything. Right up until you can&#8217;t.) Every event has some details I need to remember. I started out thinking I would always know have them at hand. But the more events I ran and the busier I got, I was forgetting things. Every event is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4198,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New Post - Event Planning Rule 5 - Write Things Down","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[624,977,986],"class_list":["post-4192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-wrote-about","tag-event-planning","tag-rules-of-event-planning","tag-write-it-down"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/Rule5-header.jpg?fit=1529%2C1685&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4192"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4199,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4192\/revisions\/4199"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}