Calendars Before Cartwheels
Do the Hard to Do the Fun
Getting to an airport extra early isn't my usual style, but today felt different. But today is different. I decided to come a couple hours early to write this. Cause I'm jazzed up. I've been in Chicago all week doing planning sessions for SporcleCon 2025.
We have a fairly radical new concept for the future of SporcleCon that I'll share another time. Small spoiler, it involves a transformation of how SporcleCon engages with its attendees and the overall event experience. This particular element (not the whole con) will happen in this space:
I've been so excited to work on this piece in particular the past several weeks as it evolves in our minds. It started as a half-assed idea and is now fully evolving (at least in my brain). The thing I was looking forward to most about this week was spending time in a creative space working on this new idea. Doing it without distractions, while in the physical space, with other creative minds, was something this idea needed. I was excited.
While Monday and Tuesday saw bits and pieces of time dedicated to talking about the what-ifs around the ideas, we hadn't quite got to the creative mind space to really dig in fully. We had a lot of other things to discuss too.
Yesterday was our last full day, and my coworker and planning partner in crime, Becca, stopped us an hour or so into the morning as we were talking schedules for next year's event. We had spent a good chunk of time on Tuesday working on that as well.
She also had a thing that was really important to her that we work through and get done while we were in person: building out calendars with deadlines for the year, action plans, assigning projects and roles, and all the nitty-gritty. She made her hopes and priorities clear well before stepping off a plane this week, emphasizing the need to focus on actions and plans that allow the team to start moving forward with purposeful momentum.
Details are hard for me sometimes. I'll admit it. I've been told in the past that I don't always like to get in the weeds. And that's true. I'm best suited to work on creative things. I'm fortunate to work with amazing people who are outstanding at getting in the weeds with me. I'd be lost without them. Don’t get me wrong, I can buckle down with the best of them and build out spreadsheets and really focus on small details. It’s just not my forte.
I know how vitally important the details (and weeds) are to the entire operation of anything. The idea of spending hours on them at the end of an exhausting three days, especially when we hadn't touched the creative project I dreamed of talking about the last few weeks, felt daunting.
But I knew the project Becca wanted to spend time on was more important, even if it was hard for us at the time. And truth be told about Becca, she thrives in the creative too, so I knew she wanted to get to that same discussion. But she was smart enough in that moment to table all the "fun" talk and refocus our time. We refilled the coffees and dug in.
The next few hours surprised me. We actually found great joy in working on the hard project. The amount of moving parts for SporcleCon is insane. We built some pretty good starting points for action plans, calendars, project ownership, and more. Because we buckled down and dialed in on the hard thing for a few hours, we were then rewarded with two hours at the end to plan out our new concept I mentioned earlier.
We were in a coworking space downtown. By the time we really started to dig in on the creative project, we were one of the only people in the building. It felt like we had downtown Chicago to ourselves. We moved into this cavernous boardroom meant for 20 people with a weird air freshener that emitted unexpected noises , just the two of us with the most beautiful whiteboard one could ask for.
There were whiteboard markers flying (literally), cartwheels and headstands (by Becca, not me), and pure joy to plan this concept. It was the reward for a hard week. And it was probably joy that wouldn't have felt the same had we not spent the time on the hard thing first (side note: read Eat That Frog).
As I sit in the airport to come home, I'm very excited about these new concepts and sharing them with others, but I'm more excited that we did the hard project (and more important one) first. Here’s a super blurred version of our fun at the end of the week…
