Planning and organizing events is quite stressful. Event management has recently been included among the ten top most stressful jobs. The techniques discussed in this article will help you work increasingly efficiently and get necessary relief from event planning stress.
Use technology
Use technology where it provides usefulness and cuts down tedious work. Use online registration instead of the old way of registering by fax, which is slow and stressful. You could create a Twitter account for the event if you have an understanding of social media, appropriate audience and validation from the management.
Break down the event essentials into individual tasks
Think of all the tasks you need to do before, during and after the event and make lists. You will feel relieved because having the whole event solution plan in your head is terrible. You could cause a bottleneck for many decisions because many people would look at you for decisions. Once your list is ready, allocate tasks to relevant persons.
Use contemporary tools to make notes and lists
Technology can help you in doing both of these. Many event planners love Evernote, a cross-platform tool that lets you take pictures to remember things and is especially good for people with eidetic or photographic memory. If you are the list-making type, use Asana, which offers usefulness and simplicity.
Don’t multitask
Review the times you’ve multitasked and you will realize that you got less done and less efficiently. To save yourself from this stress, do one thing at a time. The image of the typical event planner is someone doing ten different things simultaneously. While this might be true during an event, while planning it, stop multitasking.
Take care of yourself
The better you take care of yourself, the fewer tendencies you will have to over-react to everything. Event management professionals tend to be prone to offering hospitality and ignore their own needs. We all know that eating healthy, exercising and avoiding coffee and alcohol reduce exhaustion and correlated stress levels; we just need to implement it.
Build cohesiveness within your team
Your limited budget, the managements’ demands and the suppliers cause stress. Add to that continual conflict within the team, and you are bound to be exhausted. To reduce the cost of conflict, implement strategic techniques for collaborative team building, or better yet, become a strong influencer and make people agree with you mostly, if not always.