In case you hadn't noticed, the SES Chicago 2006 agenda is up. It actually went up over a week ago, but I've not said much to try and stem off all the people asking about sessions openings. Yes, if you want to speak, the remaining openings are now up here.

Every wonder how I pull together an agenda with over 70 sessions logistically? I use somewhat similar technology to how Matt Cutts records suggestions, good old analog paper and pen -- in particular, lots of 3M Post-It Notes.

Here's a look at the agenda before it got turned into the nice at-a-glance grid now online.

And a close-up of Day 1:

Most of what I do starts in Outlook. I have sessions in mind, plus I get emailed session suggestions. Those all become subfolders within Outlook. Then it's decision time. All the session ideas become Post-It notes. I have sheets with probably 200 notes for sessions that I've done over the years or may be considering.

To get started, I find the sheets from the last show (SES San Jose, in this case). I weed out sessions that may have been one-timers, a few that didn't do so well or others that simply lose out so I can try new stuff. The hardest part is most sessions do well. It's really sad to make a cull, because of this. But the herd is stronger in the end! By the way, I refer to speakers on such sessions to be "orphan speakers." If they've done a good job, I make it a priority to try and help orphans find a new home.

That leaves me with a lot of blank spaces. Now I start sifting through my big bank of ideas, new sessions, sessions that have taken a break and so on. Post-It notes start flying around my desk.

See how a few sessions are multi-stacked notes? That's when you get a variety of sessions that are somewhat related. I can't run them all, so I start consolidating the ideas.

Oh, the color of notes means nothing. It's just whatever I have. I've thought about using colored notes to mean paid, organic, advanced and so on. But getting that organized with Post-It notes scares me.

When I've settled on a plan, I then fire up Frontpage (yes, don't mock me. It's a good program for a writer who wants inline spell checking, and curses onto Microsoft for making me ultimate have to decide if this Expression Web Designer program will be the right successor to it). I open up my last at-a-glance agenda. Zap go the things not returning, then I move what remains as appropriate and add in the new sessions.

If you look close, a few sessions now online won't be exact matches to my Post-It notes. Changes can happen even after the Post-It note stage.

I'm sure there might be great planning tools out there, but this method does fine by me. I like my Post-Its. And interestingly, Chris Sherman does it the exact same way. Neither of us realized this until we were talking planning a few years ago. "You use Post-Its too?!!!"

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