What should you do first thing in the morning once you’re at your desk and ready to work?

It’s a question many people are still unsure about.

Often it’s spent clearing out emails, making tea/coffee and generally just trying to ‘get into work mode.’

But those first 60 minutes could be the most important of the day, and if you can develop a few simple habits for how to spend them, it will transform both your productivity and the success of your events.

Here we share with you 6 daily habits that will have a profoundly positive effective on your events.

Daily Habit 1: Review your newest attendees (5 minutes)

The first thing you should do is see who has registered for your upcoming event over the last 24 hours.

Why?

Firstly it will give you a positive boost when you see new attendees registered. It provides the positive momentum you need in the morning, proof that your hard work is paying off. And that’s even better than an artisanal flat white for boosting your energy levels too.

What if no one registered the previous day? Well surely there’s no better motivation than wanting to avoid that scenario again tomorrow!

Secondly, reviewing your most recent attendees every day will help you to see patterns emerge quickly. Are they all similar kinds of attendees? Have they mostly been signing up from the same (or similar) marketing channels? Are they all buying the same kind of ticket and not others?

Seeing patterns like this – instead of just looking at large data dumps once a week or once a month – will keep you close to what’s working (and what isn’t) and give you a much finer sense for the success of your event.

Daily Habit 2: Talk to one of your customers (15 minutes)

After reviewing your latest attendees, pick up the phone and give one of them a call. Either pick them at random or reach out to the most representative.

Why?

Because it will vastly increase your understanding of your customers and your audience in general.

You can stop inferring patterns from data and start clarifying your assumptions by asking your customers directly. Why did they decide to purchase a ticket? What do they hope to get from your event? Where did they hear about it? Did anything nearly stop them from purchasing?

This is incredibly valuable to any organiser, and if you do it every day, you’ll quickly have an incredible level of understanding when it comes to your customers – a sure fire recipe for running successful events.

Secondly, you should talk to at least one of your recent customers because they’re your most engaged attendee right now – they just loved your event so much they signed up for it – and so they’re most likely to become advocates for you.

Marketers spend all their time trying to figure out how to get non-customers to convert – but why not spend a bit more time with existing customers so they help spread the word for you?

If they’ve booked for a conference why not ask them if their colleagues would be interested? If they registered for a festival, reach out and see if they have friends who might also want to go.

They obviously believe the event is good enough to attend themselves, so why wouldn’t they share it with their network?

And how impressed will they be that you’ve taken the time to personally speak with them and get to know them better?

Daily Habit 3: Check your KPIs (5 minutes)

Once you’ve put the phone down, cast your glance over the white board, one page event ,plan or wherever you keep note of your event’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Just a brief 5 minute reminder of what they are – and how you’re tracking against them – will help in two important ways.

Firstly, it will help you focus on what matters. Having your KPIs surfaced to the top of your mind each day will stop you chasing after ‘vanity metrics’ or working on projects that don’t actually help support your key event goals.

Secondly it will mean you quickly spot any potential issues. You’ll see day-by-day if your actual metrics are starting to diverge from your planned metrics. You don’t really want to wait a month – or even a week – to start seeing negative trends emerge.

The sooner you can spot them, the sooner you can do something about them and the less severe the corrective measures will be.

Daily Habit 4: Celebrate a victory (5 minutes)

While one of the key benefits of checking on your KPIs is to ensure there’s nothing going wrong, you should also be able to see where things are going right too.

Even if it’s not metrics related, you should take 5 minutes of your day – every day – to celebrate (or at least recognise) a victory. Whatever it is, no matter how small, find a reason to stop and appreciate the achievement. Even if it’s not your own, but one of your staff or a colleague who’s done something particularly well.

Taking the time to stop and recognise a victory creates positive reinforcement both internally and externally (if you’re congratulating others) and everyone performs better when they’re in a positive frame of mind.

Secondly, that positive reinforcement will make it much more likely you or your colleague will repeat the behaviour that was just recognised. This essentially means you’ll be doubling down on what works – and not dwelling on what didn’t – a great strategy if you want to radically increase your event’s success

Daily Habit 5: Read something off topic (10 minutes) 

With that warm glow of achievement fresh in your mind, take 10 minutes to read, watch or listen to something different and unrelated to your day-to-day.

I don’t mean just browse endlessly through headlines – I mean pick something, anything – and actually get absorbed in it. It could be a random magazine you picked up, a story in the paper you’d normally ignore, a newsletter you often delete, a recommended YouTube video or an article your friend just shared on Facebook.

Why?

By getting out of your comfort zone, expanding your horizons and potentially challenging your thinking, you’ll get your creative juices flowing. New ideas are formed this way as synapses fire and new, seemingly unrelated topics begin to forge connections.

Reading something new like this every day will give you a far broader general knowledge, improve your ability to innovate and come up with breakout ideas, and quite frankly make you a more rounded person too!

There is another second benefit to taking these 10 minutes in order to get absorbed in something non-work related. It will very likely help you with problem solving.

When the conscious mind wanders (and switches off focusing on a difficult challenge) it gives the unconscious mind some space to come up with the solution.

You’ll be surprised how often the next thought you have after you’ve finished your reading will be (if not a great new idea), then an answer to some previously difficult problem. If you’re lucky it could be both.

Daily Habit 6: Try one new thing (20 minutes)

In this final 20 minutes, with all that positivity and all those creative juices flowing, it’s time to try something new.

Update your email signature, mix up the targeting demographics on your paid social promotion, change the wording on your call to action button…

It could be anything, and it should ideally be quite small. Whatever you try should simply by a calculated guess that doing it will help improve your event even just 1%.

That’s because 1% improvements – otherwise known as marginal gains – add up to huge wins and positive outcomes when taken in aggregate. It’s the theory Dave Brailsford applied to Sky’s hugely successful cycling team and Britain’s equally successful 2012 Olympic cycling team.

Trying something new each day also builds a bias for action and making things happen. It stops change seeming scary, and allows you to experiment every day until you find another best practice that helps your event reach new levels of success.

Conclusion 

Here’s the challenge: starting tomorrow morning, why not follow these 6, simple daily habits and see what a difference it makes to your day, your mood and your events?

By focusing on what matters, celebrating wins, creating a positive mind-set, leaving room for creativity and spotting any potential problems early, you’ll be forging habits that can profoundly transform your workday and the results you get.

Let us know how you get on in the comments below, or share any other top tips for kicking off your day with winning habits.