80/20 Event Diet?

So I’m catching up with what’s happening in the industry. You know, one of these days when you zeroed-out your mailbox and entered the “save for later” folder in your favorite e-mail app.

You probably wonder about how do you clean your Inbox? Since you are asking, we intensively worked on the relaunch of Croportal last week, and as a reward, the team had a couple of days off.

At this very moment I’m writing the post in one of the 40+ tabs in Safari. And I still haven’t option-spaced NetNewsWire. There’s recent unpacked shipment from Amazon on a shelf across the table. If only days would last longer.

There was a time when web standards pioneers had all the important stuff only in the Bookmarks, because there was simply just a few resources. It was quite handy and convenient having them all in the Bookmarks bar. I sometimes miss that comfort.

Where there was just a dozen of on-topic resources to follow, now is the hundreds. Where there was 2 or three events a year, now is the ten or 20 at least.

I was introduced by 80/20 rule back in 2004. Fast-forward four years later and I wonder which ones are considered today’s 20% must-read authors? Even if I knew, one would still need considerable amount of time for all the latest stuff.

The above question applies to events, too – are there 20% events that cover 80% of the current topics?

The schedule can be occasionally a serious threat, time and budget-wise. Especially if you have to travel across the continent and have tons of work that just don’t allow frequent travel breaks.

We’ve been practicing various media diet programs. Should we also consider event diet?

How to judge which one to choose and which one to discard from the list? With media, you test it for some period and then decide is it good enough to enter reader’s A-list, but for obvious reasons, you can’t apply the same method with events.

Marko Dugonjić is a designer specialized in user experience design, web typography and web standards. He runs a nanoscale user interface studio Creative Nights and organizes FFWD.PRO, a micro-conference and workshops for web professionals.

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