RockCon: 4 Tactics to Get the Most Out of a Conference

Hey speed racers!  

Just got back from staging the tremendous coup of working at the San Francisco Game Developers Conference this past week.  This got me thinking of the varied conference-going hacks I've picked up over the past couple years that help maximize the experience:  

• Alternate Payment Models:  There is a time and a place to pay the full admission price, however I've found 9 times out of 10 there's a better way to do it.  For instance in general, I'm young, garrulous, and interested in learning about traditionally male-dominated industries (gaming, infosec, VC, etc.)  It's usually pretty easy to get a volunteer spot and much easier to chat folks up, get the stupid questions out of my system, etc. lending a hand than sitting in an audience.  Likewise, if I were hugely knowledgeable about the industry, I would gun for a speaker position and use my spare time following up with contacts who approached me or approaching the guys on my own watch list.  If I were somewhere in between and a good writer, I'd gun for a press badge.  You get the picture.  If an event is out of your price range, ask yourself what you really want to get out the event and what you bring to the party.  Your answer and the logical next actions might surprise you.  
• Scheduling:  I see folks go to one extreme or another on this.  The seasoned guys often shrug off the talks entirely as things for noobies and end up catching up with their extended social network for the duration of the conference.  That's great guys, but you're not meeting new people, picking up new ideas.  Sounds like a fast track to obsolescence.  The noobies plan out their entire calendar down to 10 minute intervals.  What happens if you meet someone fascinating and want to take an extended lunch with them?  Or if a new awesome talk comes up?  You're out of luck.  In general, I treat talks like mini-classes and ask myself what I want to get out of them in advance.  If something better comes up or I realize 5 minutes into the talk that it's not everything I thought it would be (and more!) I take a walk.  
  
• Document Management:  Basic tenants = consolidate everything in one place and sort it frequently before your cache refreshes.  I'm such a sucker for free swag.  Notebooks, business cards, you name it.  By the end of the Con, I have a slew of notes to self scribbled on napkins, flyers, programs, and the full complement of notebooks I got/brought to the con (Marble pocket sized ones are my favorite-- Moleskine's are too nice and I'm afraid to sully them with my unruly scrawls).  My system thus far (please suggest further hacks!) consists of:  

Pockets!  I don't care how hot the skirt is, if it doesn't have pockets, I'm not rocking it.  One of these days, I will get a Lara Croftesque thigh holster to hold a notebook, business cards and pens, but until that day, I'm a pocket devotee.  I also leverage the pockets in name badges, where available.  

Multiple pens!  Because you always loan one to a klepto or your favorite one runs out of ink.  Lately, I've been debating picking up a silver jelly roll style one because everyone has these damn artsy fartsy black background business cards that are impossible to scribble notes to self on the back of, which brings me to... 

Notes to self:  OK, I don't do this in front of the person, but I try to periodically batch process my piles 'o cards so I remember the context I met people in (who does it make sense to follow up, friend, avoid like the plague?)  you get the picture... which brings me to:  

To Do Designation: In general, I capture 3 kinds of information.  A.  Notes for future reference B.  time-sensitive action items C.  stupid doodles to make an idea sink in or convince the dude sitting next to me I'm hella smart (or hella bad at drawing).  I use boxes, arrows, and underlines to draw my attention to "B" time-sensitive action items and try to transfer them onto my to-do list asap.    

• Systemic Management:  Playing a sustained A game is really tough, especially with late nights fraternizing.  

Water:  I'm a huge fan of water because not only does it keep me from wilting, I can pack in a status water bottle if I'm feeling insecure, and if I drink enough, I always have a viable reason to excuse myself from a lame conversation.  

Sleep:  I know folks who like to pack hotel rooms like they would a burrow of hibernating mice.  I say, "know thyself."  I like to go to bed early, get up early, and recharge solo.  A lot of time, having a personal asylum is way more valuable than cost savings from load balancing.  

Exercise:  A bit counterintuitive to prioritize this, but to drop one of my favorite Sandra Bernhardt quotes, "energy begets energy; it is by spending oneself that one becomes rich."  A decent yoga session is a great way to recenter in the heady conference environment.  If you're really in a pinch, my favorite hack is to stream 8 min [insert body part here] videos from the 80's for a good chuckle with my endorphins.  

Food:  With cookies and coke in high supply, this is a challenge to sustain.  But trust me, you don't want to come off a sugar high in a dim room of an afternoon session... Particularly if you're jet lagged.  Worst case, Starbucks sells decent oatmeal and bananas at a manageable price (by SBux standards).  

P.S.  Lun Sophal is getting his recycling activities underwritten because I'm late in reposting... 

SIP + Social

Major takeaways from the last couple days

SIP -  don't agonize about bidding, just show up and sit in on open classes.  

• Leadership Under Fire: Handling Hostility - Draw on lessons and practice from Curhan's negotiations class for getting comfortable in uncomfortable situations.  Set reasonable minimum expectations for the interaction (i.e. clearly communicating bad news and thoroughly understanding the audience's reaction on a logical and emotional level rather than hoping everyone will leave best friends). 
• Teams and Decision Making - Unify your personal brand.  It's better for everyone to agree on who you are than rely on them to compare notes and piece you together. (e.g. "I don't get him, sometimes I see him and he's super serious, got his act together organizing 100k stuff, but every time I see him when he goes out, he goes out...")
• The Hunt - Theories about how the world works dramatically impact behaviors towards it.  There are many roads to contributing/influencing a team, so it's best not to write someone off because they don't contribute through the conventional channels.  

Socializing - stick with the chicks and lay off the "obligatory" rounds of Feel Bad Tomorrow.

• DYL lunch buddy - Healthy personalities reinforce each other.  Women have a much lower fail rate on friend dates, for some reason.  
• Tapas - It's amazing how much can get cooked via teamwork.  The Korean crew is really artistic with plating and presentation!  DIY bacon wrapped dates = tremendously good idea.  
• Ted's Low Key B-Day - Mathieu was completely right about fluid dynamics applied to seating arrangments at tables.  You don't have meaningful conversations with people at the far end, it's awkward to talk to people at your poles (immediately left, right or in front), so sit catty corner to people you want to catch up with.
• Dropkick Murphys - Music is more awesome when you know all the words.  Leland's car is a few modifications short of the Back to the Future DeLorian.  
• Stimulus Party - Guess who got away with drinking just water + 1 sip of Rumor's vodka tonic all night!  I'm expecting CM to mock up a faithful clay model of me on SensAble after such extensive "research."  JVA's worth a hotlist, he's definitely earned his entourage.     

Operationalizing To Do Lists

Empowering Rafail to start his own henhouse due to my blog update tardiness...

Like many of us, I've been MIA due to my extraordinarily long to-do list. Sitting in operations, bleary from 4AM shifts babysitting Littlefield and wondering when I would cobble together time to write a book report about The Goal, I had an epiphany. Why can't we apply the principles we learn in operations to optimize our personal lives?

While in no way the answer, here's a starting discussion on the themes covered in the Goal:

• Finding bottlenecks: Bottlenecks tend to have a lot of "inventory" piled up in front of them. Similarly, I look for the items that are stagnating on my to-do list (i.e. products and services paper, goal book review, and finish a powerpoint presentation for a faculty member). Then I look for common threads, (i.e. several of my stagnating to do's involve massive amounts of content creation).
• Actions to improve bottlenecks: I found that my "content creation" engine was hijacked by a lot of "firedrills," projects which felt urgent, but meant that I had to scrap set up time. You've probably seen this before, feeling like you've frittered away an entire "heads down" day sitting on conference calls and ceding your calendar to the caprice of the numerous teams you are a part of.

Step 1. Catalog backlog. i.e. I defined my top 4 domains: Growth, Physical, Psychological, and Interpersonal Health. Things which built toward this would give me the value I needed to "make money" and potentially "expand my operations." Anything that didn't resonate with these fell off the list. This is similar to subcontracting or delegating processing to other machines or vendors to relieve the capacity constraint.

Step 2. Cut detractions from setup time. i.e. ongoing email checking and last minute meeting commitments.

Step 3. Having all the requisite materials on hand. i.e. if an aging to do is "waiting" on an input, track down the input or decide you don't need the input before slotting processing of aged to do into the schedule. i.e. we don't need more interviews to strike this idea off the list. This is similar to reevaluating the steps in an existing process.

Step 4. Apply rigorous standards to amount of time spent on a task. i.e. impose "hard stops" on meetings.

Step 5. While upholding those standards, find ways to increase the quality/minimize the rework. i.e. use conference bridges so that people don't waste time commuting/waiting for stragglers.

Step 6. Cut batch sizes elsewhere to match processing capacity and eliminate inventory build up. i.e. don't send out a whole bunch of meeting requests if your calendar is jam packed through May.

• "Balanced demand" = bankruptcy. Huge epiphany here. Planning all 24 hours of your day (100% utilization) will kill you. Sometimes an explosion of time-sensitive orders will hit you all at once and you won't have the bandwidth to process them in time. Likewise, I realized the sacrifices I had made on my growth, physical, psychological, emotional, and interpersonal health fronts actually stunted my capacity. Some activities recharge us. It's important to build in some downtime for maintenance.
• Cutting order size decreases cycle time: since a lot of my backlogged items were magnum opuses, I found I made more headway by breaking them into smaller steps. However, with this approach comes the costs of multiple "set ups." So if you're logging tasks to the minutiae of spending as much time building/maintaining a to do list as you are to do'ing it, you may have cut order size too much.
• Which process should be the bottleneck? I haven't fully thought this through, but my preference would be to have the bottleneck as close to the front of the process as possible. That way you can turn away/triage excess demand quickly before it becomes backorders. Likewise, I'm starting to play with ways to cap my total commitments and say "no" to things instead of letting them languish mid-process.

4 Ways for Nice People to Finish First

Somewhere between Mechanical Turks and BattleBots, people were programming NegotiationBots. NegotiationBots came loaded with AI geared to optimize their outcome in sequential prisoner's dilemmae. At the end of the tourney, the last bot standing hadn't "won" a single negotiation. Instead, it had created coalitions which grew the pie for both it and its partner, by starting cooperative and then mirroring it's partner's move. This ended up netting the highest number of aggregate points.

Tit for Tat Bot's logic wasn't that different from Tat Man's [ (<...] strategy for working with people:


(1) Be Clear
(< : "It's really simple. I mirror people; reflect back what they're giving me."
M!NU5: "So what if you end up in escalating reciprocation?"
(< : "Yeah, well, escalating gets you in trouble. You gave me a valentine, but if I escalated, my package wouldn't fit in your mailfolder..." ::pregnant pause::

(2) Be Nice
M!NU5: ::coughs:: "... orbiters... thoughts?"
(< : "They're your friends. They're figuring themselves out. Let them play. Make mistakes..."

(3) Be Provokable
(< : "Yeah, if they're not taking a hint, no sense for you to keep taking it on the chin. React enough to set them straight... but the vindictiveness is overkill. If you really couldn't care less, it would roll off you, be out of your mind. Cleaning their blood off your floor is wasting your own time."
M!NU5: "Friendship isn't something I take lightly."

(4) Be Forgiving
(< : "The sanctity of friendship? Hah! Hate to break it to you, honey bunny, but categorizing and labeling people gets you nowhere. It's arbitrary. People can run the entire spectrum of emotions over 7 mins. No sense being surprised if you catch them trying to act out of the stereotype you carved out for them... Like right now, I'm thinking I want to sleep with you."
M!NU5: "... Seems our 7 mins is up."