5 Tips To Getting the Most out of Your Next Conference

by Janet Sydnor

You attend a conference to learn, grow and improve your business, professional expertise or personal skills. Session after session fills you with insights on how to do something better or new ideas to pursue. Hours of content. Dozens of lightbulb moments. Pages of notes written on handouts or electronically. A wealth of inspiration and yet, you, and most of your fellow attendees will go home and continue to do things exactly the same way you always did them. Why? Because change is hard, building new habits is difficult and knowing what to do first is nearly impossible.

Having a strategy in place prior to attending your next conference will help make the most out of your investment of time and money.  Follow these 5 steps so your inspiration and aspirations become actualizations.

1. Plan your Session Attendance in Advance – many conferences now have an app for that. Take the time to review the descriptions and use the app to create your conference calendar. If your event is still running only on a website or on paper, record in your personal calendar.
2. Download the Handouts in Advance – whenever possible get the handouts into your electronic device or print them out, so you can make notes directly on them. The visuals will help remind you why that note was important, far more than a disconnected note on a separate page.
3. Create a Follow Up List – this is the most critical step, if you do nothing else, do this. This list is for the things you know you want to do when you get home. Have a separate document to list ideas you want to pursue after the conference. The gems, the a-ha’s, the “why am I not already doing this?” ideas go here. When you hear a great idea, strategy or action that will make a difference in your business, professional or personal life, write down a bullet point on your Follow Up List that will remind you to do it after the conference.
4. Meet People – seems obvious, but many of us would prefer to sit with the people we already know, rather than feel awkward with strangers. Your conference colleagues are likely to be people very much like you, they probably have similar interests and goals and somewhere in that mix is someone who might make a huge impact on your professional or personal life. Go find them.
5. Prioritize Your Follow Up List – when you get home, pull out the Follow Up List and put it in order. Evaluate the items for two things: 1) will it make a big impact and; 2) how much will it take to do it in terms of money and time? Do the easy wins first. These are the things you can easily implement and don’t require a big financial or time investment. Schedule time on your calendar to begin researching the items that could make a big impact but require more planning and/or money to implement. Once a month, go back to the list to see what can be done next.

I use a Remarkable electronic notebook to store my conference handouts, notes and Follow Up List. I have been ticking off easy wins from my Follow Up List while working on developing a big impact idea that requires a big investment of time and a medium investment of money. My business will be stronger because I actually implemented the new ideas and strategies I learned about from the conference experts.