At some point in your career, you might be asked to organize a planning session, 2 day offsite, something that a group of people will attend. You will be in charge of what they do for those 2 days. Having planned many, and attended many, here are my top 5 lessons learned.

1. Schedule the subjects and speakers in an order that makes sense. Think of it like organizing chapters in a book. If you’re going to have a discussion about strategy, make sure the key subjects are teed up ahead of time.

2. Schedule 30 minute breaks. 15 minutes turn into 30 minutes anyway. People need to return calls, read blackberry. If you don’t give them sufficient breaks, they’ll do it during the meeting. I always schedule a mid-morning, and a mid afternoon break and order snacks, coffee, water to keep the energy up.  Sometimes it’s a working lunch, but they always get the breaks.

3. Be available to review decks and provide feedback, but don’t get too hung up on form over substance. Now some meetings, you won’t have a choice and will need to follow clear guidelines.  But I like to let people reuse materials they may have already created. Be clear about deadlines, and let folks know: miss the deadline, you’re walking in with copies for everyone. Most people want to avoid showing folks that they were late. Don’t cut production time too close.

4. Make sure someone is keeping track of key questions, subjects, and follow ups. I keep notes during the session, and will type them up at the end of the day, and distribute them the next morning for comments from the team. It keeps the material fresh, the group focused, and makes it a lot easier to remember the takeaways post meeting.

5. Leave room for the unexpected. If it’s a large group, and a controversial topic, I’ll give the speakers 30 minutes, but I’ll schedule an extra 30 minutes for “buffer time” in the agenda. Nothing’s worse than having to cut off a great conversation because of time. I’ll also schedule a few “free-floating” topics which can be moved around if we go over.

The point of the offsite is to bring the group together to be updated and informed, but also to enable the group to make decisions in a short period of time. The best ones accomplish both.