Event Planning Best Practices (1) 

Time Management (Part 1)

TIME management skills are a necessity in event planning without which no one should ever think of becoming an event planner. To be successful as an event planner, you must be able to manage your time well, ensuring that you are productive most of your time and avoiding time wasters at all cost.

In this article on Time Management as an Event Planning’s best practice, we have identified two broad ways to manage your time well, which are: (i) overcoming common time management mistakes, and (ii) estimating time accurately.

Common Time Management Mistakes

Mistake No. 1- Not setting Personal Goals

Personal goals setting is most essential to managing your time and even life well, because goals provide you with a destination to work towards and when you have in focus where you are going, managing time and resources becomes much easier. Goals setting also help you decide what’s worth spending your time on and what is only a distraction.

Note however that goals are effective when they are clearly defined and SMART i.e. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time bound. That way, you will be highly motivated to achieve them.

Mistake No. 2- Not keeping a To-Do List

Keeping a To-Do list helps you avoid the nagging feeling and guilt of forgetting to do an important piece of work. You must cultivate the habit of keeping a note pad always with you as an event planner to write all your To-Dos rather than keeping them all in your head. Remember that “the dullest pencil is more effective than the sharpest brain.”

The key however, to effectively keeping a To-Do list is to prioritize the tasks on your list, and if you have large tasks on your lists, be sure to break them down into specific, actionable steps to avoid missing key steps and even procrastinations.

Mistake No. 3- Not prioritizing

This is really essential if you must manage your time well, although it’s sometimes hard to know how to prioritize especially when you are faced with several seemingly urgent tasks. One way to prioritize effectively is being able to determine if a task is high-yield and high-priority or is a low-value, fill-in work. You’ll manage your time better when you are able to differentiate among tasks in such way.

Mistake No. 4- Inability to say “No”

If you find it difficult to say ‘no’, then you most likely will be taking on much more tasks than you can handle. Or if you prefer to do all the necessary work yourself rather than delegate, thinking the other person won’t do a good job, you will not be making the best use of your time. Either way, taking on too much at a time is a very poor use of your time which can only earn you the reputation of a poor performer who only produces sloppy work.

So the next time someone asks you to do something for them that constitutes a poor use of your time, you just learn to say ‘yes’ to the person, but ‘no’ to the task.

Mistake No. 5- Not Managing Distractions

Most times, distractions come in very subtle ways you can hardly recognize them as such. They could be emails, a staff in a crises situation or even a phone call from a client. In whatever way they present themselves, distractions will make you lose so much time and prevent you from achieving set daily objectives. You should therefore learn to minimize distractions and improve your concentration when faced with them.

Mistake No. 6- Procrastinations

Procrastination is simply putting off a task you should be doing now till a later time. This thief of time suggests to its victim that there is still a lot of time to get the work done, until suddenly, everything catches up with him and then he realizes there’s no longer time to complete the task.

Procrastinators also feel they always have to complete a huge task all at once and this makes them feel overwhelmed and anxious. To beat this therefore, learn to break large projects into manageable chunks that can be completed at a time and always devote time to starting.

One of the top secrets of being a successful event planner is to recognize and overcome time management mistakes. That way, you can have a more rewarding career and be happier for it.

Until next week when we bring you the concluding part of this article, be sure to keep your event dream alive.

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