CiscoLive US is my absolute FAVORITE work week of the entire year! ….. And it is JUST around the corner!

By now, I usually have blogged my schedule. This year I admit I wasn’t going to. Why? Well just look at Tuesday starting at 10:15am. I go hide for what looks to be 5 hours. Yup… I was “afraid of what people would think” if I published my schedule.

How I Plan My CiscoLive Schedule

It is SO essential, in my opinion, to really approach your CLUS week schedule with a mindset of knowing what your priorities are.

I’m a big “7 Habits for Highly Effective People” fan… so really I pretty much just decide what my top priorities are for the week and work backwards from there.

My top priority for the entire week is to be absolutely 100% for the all the sessions I teach – from the one at 9am on Sunday morning to the one at 8am on Thursday morning. Everything else I do must never get in the way, for me, of my top priority/goal for the week.

Ready to look at your schedule?

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Planning Your Schedule for CiscoLive

STEP #1: Create Your Cisco Live 2018 Priority List

Take your goals and translate them into a priority list.

STEP #2: Learn from the Past

If you have been to CiscoLive before… what lessons have you learned?   Do you wish you had done things differently?  Do you wish you had paced it better?   Write it all down.

If you have never been to CiscoLive before I would suggest talking to a few people who have.  Reach out to them.. ask tons of questions…. and learn from their past. 

STEP #3: Time to Hit the Session Catalog

• Come up with a list of key words or topics (e.g. IoT, StealthWatch, IPv6,…. whatever)
• Go into the scheduling system and find all the sessions that match theses keywords
• Read the abstracts.
• Get your “priority” classes worked out first and officially sign up for them

STEP #4: Make Sure to Review Other CiscoLive Offerings

Every year more and more … and still more and more…. get added to CLUS.   So I do suggest taking time to look at the big picture of the varying activities and look to see if anything calls to you.

STEP #5: Use a Calendar and Fill it All In

Ready for the next step?  Take a calendar and put all of your activities in it.  When you look at it… do you feel exhausted?  I’m sorry to say that if you do…. this doesn’t bode well for whatever you listed as a priority for Thursday.  What I do is actually block out time to recharge and relax.  Everything that is a priority of mine for the week I want to be rested and fully present for energy wise. I also block out specific blocks as buffers because there are going to be things you are going to want to do that you just didn’t plan for or expect.

STEP #6: Accept the Fact that You Can’t be in 2 Places at Once

With so very much to do at CiscoLive in the US, it is a common issue to want to be in 2 places at the same exact time. This is hard and happens to me every year. This year there are 9 sessions that I was really looking forward to going to… but I just can’t make. If you are still looking for suggestions about what to attend… these are the ones I wish I could be in two places for. 🙂

• SOCGEN-1000: Arrival Tweetup, Sun, June 9th 5:45pm-7:15pm
• BRKSEC-2010: Talos Insights – The State of Cyber Security, Mon June 10th 1pm-2:30pm
• BRKSEC-2462: Stealthwatch Beyond Alarms, Tues, June 11th 8am-10am
• BRKRST-1101: IoT for Network Engineers, Tues June 11th 1pm-2:30pm
• BRKSEC-2430: ISE Deployment Staging and Planning, Tues June 11th 4pm-6pm
• BRKRST-2560: Using Analytics/Machine Learning/AI for SD-WAN Networks, Wed June 12th 4pm-5:30pm
• DEVWKS-1545: Operationalizing Stealthwatch with API Capabilities (DevNet Workshop), Wed June 12th 2pm-2:45pm and Thu June 13th 9am-9:45am
• BRKRST-2377: SD-WAN Security, Thu June 13th 8am-10am
• BRKRST-2449: Extending the Enterprise to the IoT Edge, Thu, June 13th 10:30am-12pm

STEP #7: Have a BLAST!

🙂

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