Inspiration brought to you by the TM Planning Department

About a month ago, I attended the Planningness Conference in Denver.  The conference, like its predecessor put on by the 4As, is all about bringing the community of planners together to share and discuss ideas.  It’s a time to take a step back and refocus on the core of the discipline as well as think ahead about the next evolution or use of our planning skills.  Basically, it’s a nerdathon. 🙂

I had the opportunity to see many great speakers on various topics:

Aki Spicer:  How to Build Applications

Kate Lutz:  How to Tell a Good Story

Avin Narasimhan/Dino Demopolous:  How to Get Mobile

Scott Belsky:  How to be Effective

Richard Reinhart:  How to be a Digital Curator

Ari Popper:  How to do We-Search

Len Kendall:  How to Create Participation

Paul Isakson:  How to Wander

Please let me know if any one of these is of particular interest to you and I can expand on what I learned.

I gave a presentation to my Planning team about my overall learnings – the key things that I took away from this conference using the above sessions to provide rich examples.  What I landed on were a bunch of actions/verbs that I felt from the planning community were what we as planners are striving to do to push ourselves forward.  We want to create more things by digging around in the digital space or helping listeners co-create a story with us.  We want to get people to participate by devising new forms of research that use consumers as researchers or building communities while understanding the behavior of people forming their own shared spaces.  We want to expand our traditional planner roles as we see the world evolve around us.  But in order to do all of this we need to act.

I want to focus on that last action as I think it will be the one to open up the doors for us to do more…but not just more stuff, the right kind of stuff.

Scott Belsky from Behance came to Planningness to talk about how to get shit done (not his words, mine).  The main idea of this is that our work is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.  Though we need to wade through the list of to-do items that make up that 99 percent, our real focus and our real value as people in a creative field lies in that 1 percent of deep thinking.

There were several resources that Belsky shared with us, but the most interesting and easily applicable to me was the 99 percent website. This website isn’t just for planners, it’s for anyone who wants to make their ideas happen.  The tips and tools on the website are not necessarily things that you’ve never heard of, but sometimes it’s worth taking a step back and thinking about how you organize yourself to get your work done.  Different things work for different people but Behance has put their time and effort into figuring out what will help us all get our work done.

Some of the tips from the conference that I thought were really interesting and helpful:

Overcome reactionary workflow and push important things forward.

Have a culture of capturing action steps and know what you’re responsible for.

Create a back burner ritual – address this list once a month, for example.

In our world of constant meetings, a barrage of deadlines, and to-do lists over a mile long, it’s sometimes the most simple thing that can help us get through what sometimes feels like the impossible – organization.  Not the sexiest subject in the world but I think Behance makes it interesting and motivational.