Most conference attendees experience some kind of high when they walk out the doors. They’ve just had their brains filled with hours or new knowledge and new ideas. Literally years of experience compressed into 30 and 40-minute chunks, downloaded directly into everyone’s minds.
New product ideas are brewing. Previously demanding client work seems easy. The sky is the limit!
What Happens Monday?
On Monday, though, this high begins to fade. The phone continues to ring. Emails keep coming in. All of the project ideas that were running rampant on the weekend begin to falter and decay.
What happened?
Life – regular life – can create tedium. Tedium breeds boredom. Boredom often yields to frustration and low productivity. Routine client work rarely inspires innovation or creativity – it’s routine and predictable. The Monday after a conference is usually the lowest point in the post-conference detox.
Ideas that seems just within grasp now appear out of reach. Client work once again resembles the difficulty it once presented. The sky feels a few thousand feet lower.
Chase the Dragon
Ask any serial conference attendees why they keep coming back, and they’ll likely rattle off a list. They like the free exchange of ideas. The innovative and exciting new presentations. The networking opportunities that paint the picture of a bright future of cooperation.
Like any other addict, they’re chasing a high.
Like any other addict, the high will still fade just as quickly.
Instead, attendees can nurture the feeling they’ve obtained by acting on it. Here are just a few things you can do after a conference to keep the feeling of development invincibility 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
- Share your list with a colleague and ask them to keep you accountable
- Join (or create) a mastermind group to keep collaborating with other smart people
Even if you find yourself addicted to conferences and the conference atmosphere, the list above is a great way to turn your Sunday high into a Monday list of awesome goals. Just be sure to actually work on these goals, or they’ll remain purely in the idea space. As I’ve said before, an idea without execution is useless – make sure your conference inspirations don’t fall into this bucket!
