Is this you? You have just experienced the best conference EVER! Your brain is full of ideas and knowledge and new ideas are brewing. You walk out of the conference excited and motivated and ready to implement everything you have learned. You are officially experiencing the conference high and the sky is the limit! What do you do now?
Then, BAM! You are back at the office and your typical Monday hits you like a bus. You start to return all your phone messages and become overwhelmed by the hundreds of unanswered emails. Your motivation and great conference ideas slowly, but steadily, begin to fade. Your motivation, ideas, and excitement are on the brink of flying out the window for good.
By Wednesday, you start to wonder, what happened? You think to yourself, “I am not even sure I remember what sessions I attended.”
The answer is simple…Life happened. Your regular routine has created boredom. Boredom often yields to frustration and low productivity. Your regular routine rarely inspires innovation or creativity—it’s routine, predictable and boring. The first few days after a conference is usually the lowest point in the post-conference detox. Your great ideas that seemed possible and exciting feel out of reach.
How can you retain this post-conference high and prevent the “crash”? We have complied a small list of things you can do after your conference to keep the feeling of development going:
- Write down your new ideas in the form of a to-do list.
- Make your to-do items actionable and set a deadline for each.
- Physically block out time in your calendar, maybe one hour a week, to implement something on your to do list.
- Share your list with a colleague and ask them to keep you accountable.
- Join (or create) a group (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google hangout are just a few free tools) to keep collaborating with other people. This might include others you met at the conference.
The list above is a great way to prevent the conference “crash” and will help turn your post-conference high into a Monday list of awesomeness. The key to this list though is to actually work on these goals, or they’ll remain purely in the idea space. Make sure your conference inspirations don’t fall into the black hole like they do for so many others.