How to Survive a Conference — A Blazingly Simple Guide
The tickets are booked. The hotel is sorted. Everyone around you seems to know what they're doing. You don't. A free, practical field guide for people going to their first industry conference — and experienced ones who still find it a bit much.
Making the most of a conference
A free field guide for people going to their first industry conference — or their fifteenth — and quietly wondering if they're doing it right. Practical, funny, light on theory, heavy on lived experience.
The conference is in three weeks and you are quietly panicking
The tickets are booked. The hotel is sorted. Your diary is blocked. Everyone around you seems to know what they're doing.
You don't.
You are wondering things you probably shouldn't have to ask out loud. What do you wear? How do you not spend the evenings alone in your hotel room eating overpriced club sandwiches? How do you talk to strangers without feeling weird? Which sessions are actually worth going to? What happens at the evening parties you're not sure whether you're invited to?
These are the quiet questions most first-time conference attendees carry in silence. And most experienced ones still carry too, if they're honest. Conferences are strange, bright, loud environments populated by people pretending to be more at ease than they really are. Knowing how to move through one is a skill, not a personality trait. And, like most skills, it can be learned.
This guide is a warm, practical field manual from someone who has attended, spoken at, and occasionally hidden in the toilets of more conferences than is probably healthy. It is not a networking playbook. It is a survival guide — for getting the most out of an event that otherwise has a habit of being overwhelming.
What's actually in the guide
Sixteen short chapters covering the things nobody tells you before your first big industry event. How to plan the travel so you are not stressed before you arrive. How to find a conversation without feeling like you're networking. How to read the expo hall. How to choose which talks to go to — and which ones to skip in favour of the corridor. How to socialise in the evenings without burning out by Tuesday morning. How to look after yourself. How to take notes that will still mean something when you get home. How to give useful feedback to the organisers. And one chapter about taking your name badge off before you get on the train home.
None of this is complicated. But it adds up. People who know these things get more out of conferences than people who don't. Not because they are more extroverted or more confident — because they have quietly worked out the unwritten rules.
Who this is for
Three groups of readers, mainly:
First-time attendees — anyone whose boss has just handed them a conference ticket and a travel budget and left them to figure the rest out. This guide is designed to be read on the plane.
Regular attendees who still find it a bit much — experienced professionals who have been to plenty of events and still find the whole circus slightly overwhelming. The social parts in particular. The guide is honest about the introvert's conference experience in a way most networking advice isn't.
Speakers — if you are going to a conference to give a talk, everything in this guide still applies, and a few things apply double. The attendee side of speaking is often harder than the talk itself.
Download the guide
An honest note about the guide
The original version of this guide was written in about an hour somewhere between 2012 and 2015. It has been updated a few times since. It is not trying to be profound. It is trying to be useful.
The tone is conversational. The advice is practical. The pages are short. You could read it cover to cover in twenty minutes, or skim it in five and still walk away with the three or four things that would have made your last conference easier.
Readers have fed back over the years that it does its job. Which, for a guide of this size, is all anyone can really ask.
If you end up on the other side of the stage
Most people who go to enough conferences eventually get asked to speak at one. If that ever happens to you — or you'd like it to — there's another guide for that.
→ Zero to Keynote — the full book on giving talks that actually land. Same practical register, longer form, serious about the craft. → Generate Talk Ideas — a free chapter from Zero to Keynote on finding ideas worth turning into talks. A good place to start.