Five rules for scheduling workshops
Updated September 2, 2023 ~ Originally published January 19, 2015 and updated June 29, 2020
Workshops take a lot of time, a lot of people, and a lot of preparation. When you schedule a workshop, you’re asking for a real investment from your participants. Schedule workshops carefully, so you don't waste anyone's time.
The optimal workshop schedule is two run no more than two, three-hour sessions per day: Session one from 9 AM – 12 Noon and session two from 1–4:00 PM.
Five rules help us get to that optimal schedule and ensure you respect everyone’s time:
Never schedule at 8am
Never schedule longer than 3 hours
Never schedule past 5pm
Never schedule on Monday
Never at schedule the end of the week
Follow these five rules, and you’ll get the most out of your time with your participants. We’ll walk through each these five rules and then look at a standard schedule you can use to schedule your workshops.
More about workshop planning
Never start at
8 AM
Two reasons to not schedule workshops to start at 8 AM. First, your facilitator should be busy getting ready to host a fantastic workshop. Second, your participants should be busy getting to the workshop location.
Facilitators are busy at 8 AM
First, facilitators should arrive to prepare an hour before the workshop starts. If the work day starts at 8am, then the facilitator needs form 8-9 AM to prepare, so the workshop can’t start earlier than 9 AM.
Let’s say you push it and force the workshop to start at 8 AM. That means your facilitator needs to arrive and get access to the space at 7 AM. That means they need to leave wherever they spent the night at 6-6:30 AM. That means the facilitator had to wake at 5-5:30 AM to get ready.
When you push to start your workshop at 8 AM, you start a long, tiring day with facilitators who had to wake up extra early. Tired facilitators don’t make your workshop better. Tired facilitators start your workshop off at a disadvantage.
Usually it won't take an hour to prepare, but that extra time is sacrosanct. The extra time comes in handy in a number of scenarios:
You run late
You have technical difficulties
You’re missing supplies
You have to make a last-minute change to the agenda
You usually spend that prior hour waiting and fidgeting about. That's ok. If you do need extra time, your participants won't waste any time waiting for you to get the projector working. A lot of people are taking a lot of time out of their day to attend this workshop. Make sure you're considerate of every second of their time.
Participants are busy at 8 AM
Think back to all of the great meetings and workshops you’ve attended. How many started at 8 AM? I’m betting none. At 8 AM, everyone is still arriving, mentally, at work. They want to open their email, plan their day, have that first or second cup of coffee and settle in. Participants are mentally busy at 8 AM.
You can see the participants’ distractions in early morning meetings. Energy is low, participation has to be wrested from their distracted heads.
At 8 AM, your participants aren’t ready to start. And that’s if they’re even there. Did they need to commute in? Drop kids off at school? Was there more traffic than usual? Were they just running late?
A workshop is too much of an investment in time and energy to try and force the rest of the world to let you start at 8 AM. Start your workshops no earlier than 9 AM and you will immediately see an improvement in how facilitators run them and how attendees participate.
Never schedule sessions longer than three hours
Think about all the people in your life with whom you spend more than three, consecutive hours. My kids rarely get more than three hours before I engineer myself a break. Is your workshop more important than the most important people in your participants’ lives?
Nope.
If you’re considerate of your participants’ time, then you’re considerate about how important their time is. Never schedule a workshop to run longer than three hours. Your participants have more important things to do.
But, wait, I hear you say. I need more than three hours of their time, I hear you say.
If you have more than three hours of material to work through, split your workshop into multiple sessions with at least one hour between each: for example, a morning session an afternoon session with an hour-long lunch break inbetween. I've done "all day" workshops where we ran a three-hour session in the morning and another 3-hour session in the afternoon. Everyone received an hour long break in-between.
Sure, we said the break was for lunch, but maybe they went back to their desks and scheduled a doctor's appointment for their kiddo, or maybe they ran to the bank. Who knows what they did with their time. It's their time, and you need to respect their time in and out of the workshop.
Never go past 5 PM
Just like you need an hour to set-up and prepare, you need an hour to wrap-up. Just like our 1-hour rule in the morning, a 1-hour rule after the workshop comes in useful in several scenarios:
You run long
You have a ton of information to capture
You have a lot of clean up
Ideally, you end the workshop at least an hour before your participants's workday ends. However, it seems reasonable to end by 5. Even if work ends at 5, it’s not uncommon for people to stay a bit later. When I say people, I mean you. Hopefully, your participants are off to grab their cleaning or take their kids to piano lessons.
Never schedule on Monday (usually)
If people need to travel to attend the workshop, then you don't want to schedule anything on the same day they travel. This is just like the “never at 8am” rule, only on a weekly scale. You don’t want to miss an important attendee’s perspective because their flight runs late, they hit inclement weather, or they’re flying through O’Hare.
There’s another reason Monday’s are bad days to schedule workshops. If something explodes over the weekend, then Monday is when your stakeholders have to come in and fight a bunch of emergency fires. You have a greater chance of people missing part or all of your workshop when they occur on Mondays.
Never schedule at the end of the week
Like rule 4, never schedule on a Monday, you also don’t want to schedule at the end of the week. Fridays are when you have to fight fires that have to be put out before you leave for the weekend. But for travellers, sometimes end of the week means Thursday.
If participants need to travel home, don’t schedule afternoon workshops on the last day. Afternoon translates literally into any time after 12 noon. In our practice, this means we schedule workshops all-day Tuesday, all-day Wednesday, and Thursday morning. That allows participants who travel Thursday afternoon to get home before too late.
This may seem like a lot of restrictions, but we get 15 hours of focused, uninterrupted, collaborative, productive time with stakeholders for workshops. That’s pretty massive.
Sample workshop schedule
Scheduling a workshop with these rules is pretty easy. You want to schedule 3-hour sessions between the hours of 9 AM and 6 PM. When we run workshops, our preferred schedule is two schedule two sessions per day. The morning session runs from 9 AM to 12 Noon. We then provide an hour for lunch and run the second session from 1-4 PM.
Facilitators arrive at 8 AM to prepare and make sure everything is ready to go. And then they stay afterward to wrap the workshop. typically this means a debrief with the primary workshop stakeholder from ~4-4:30 PM and capture and clean-up from 4:30–5:30 PM.
Respect the time of others
As with anything, combine respect for your participants, their time, and some common sense. Schedule workshops so your participants are more likely to attend and more likely to pay attention.
That means:
Don't schedule at the beginning or end of the day
Don't schedule at the beginning or end of the week
Don't schedule for longer than people can pay attention (3 hours)
Make it easy for your participants to attend and pay attention, and you will get more out of the workshops for all of the time and preparation you invest. It's a win-win. You don't waste your participants's time, and you get more out of your time.
Learn more about workshops and collaboration
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