It’s weeks like this that it’s hard to convince my friends and family that my job doesn’t consist solely of party planning. Why? Well, I’m planning a party. Ok, it’s more of an event, a breakfast event to be exact. But it’s planning for a group of people who will eat and people don’t seem to care about the specifics, just that I appear to have lied when I told them my job is more than party planning. Here’s the real deal and what I SHOULD have specified: party planning is a PART of what I do. But when one is looming, well, it takes over. Such is the case the past few days.

I’m actually planning 2 events to take place over 12 hours and to be fair, it could be much much more stressful. I know. I’ve seen them in planning stages and been here till past my bedtime getting ready. But I’ve never been at the helm. Whole other world.

There’s just so much to think about! And planning goes in waves. You start out busy, months before. If you do it right, you coast for awhile. Then you have to send out invites and manage responses; busy again. Then you relax because there isn’t that much to do until you know exactly who is coming and then it’s a sprint to the finish. Tomorrow, I’ll be sprinting.

The good thing about all this work is that unlike when you plan client events, I will get to be a guest at both, which is nice. It’s a bonus to be able to enjoy the fruits of your labour. Not only that, but I imagine it gives you a much more accurate picture of how the whole thing went. If you are standing back to watch the event, you don’t always find out that the food was only mediocre, that the conversation was stilted or engaging, etc. As far as learning experiences go, I’m confident that this one will be first-rate. That alone makes all the work and sprinting worthwhile. It just makes sense that my next event will be better and so on and so forth. But you have to start somewhere and I was lucky to start small, planning events that my colleagues and I will enjoy too.

So what are these events you ask? Shel Israel, the blogging guru and co-author of Naked Conversations is coming to town as a guest of my employer, Joe Thornley. We will first meet Shel at Third Tuesday, where PR and communications folk from around the city will meet over beer and bar food to talk about blogs and social media. On Wednesday, we are hosting a breakfast for clients and friends involved or interested in social media.

Twelve hours, two events, hours of planning, dozens of PR peeps and one social media expert. Should be interesting, should be exhausting, should be a great learning experience, should be well worth all the stress.

What was your first planning experience? Any last minute tips? Any anecdotes? Nothing that will give me nightmares, please, I have an active subconcious for such things…