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Doing More and Meeting People in New York City
>> Use LittleViews Interactive Events Calendar to Help Improve Your Active Life
The goal of many New Yorkers, especially those who've moved here to experience the Big City, is to pack our lives with activity, grow in sophistication, and acquire multitudes of new friends. With one thing leading to another, here's the formula:
Activity is the result of attending many events selected out of the thousands offered. Sophistication is the result of accumulated knowledge based on our activity. And friends (new and otherwise) are the result of mixing with people who enjoy conversations that spring out of our sophistication.
The simplicity of the formula, however, hides its complexity. Getting started is extremely hard to do, especially when we're confronted with the thousands of choices New York has to offer and no way to organize and compare the informational excess.
To help solve this problem, LittleViews is creating online organizational tools that you can use whenever you become aware of potential opportunities. The first is the LittleViews online interactive calendar, pictures of which you'll see throughout this article. Sign up by clicking the button below.
To increase our activities (and meet more people), we have to know what we want to do,who arranges these events, and where these events take place. To tie this information together, we also need a way to keep track of when the events actually happen. And, of course, accomplish this while staying within our budget.
To start increasing your activity, take this easy survey:
- Write out a list of 5 to 8 activities you love, in any order.
- Rank the list, this time starting with most loved.
For each activity you identify, write down as many event sources as you can find. A source is the origin of an event or events, and not an event itself.
Although you can easily find events in magazines and newspapers, what you want now are addresses of the people and/or organizations who put on events, including their physical addresses, phones, email addresses and websites.
Once you complete your source list, acquire your event resources by:
- Requesting catalogs
- Getting on standard mailing lists
- Getting on web-based mailing lists
Results? Within two weeks of even the simplest inquiry, it's possible that you'll generate so many resources that they become difficult to manage!
Frankly, emailed information is far harder to organize than paper. As you get serious about reviewing announcements, consider setting up this email filing system:
- Create a main folder in your email application called "Events."
- Create a sub-folder in "Events" for each event type you've identified in your I Love to Do list.
- In each sub-folder, create a folder called "Past." This is where you put email that you are not quite ready to delete.
Once you know what you want to do and you have your resources at hand, it's time to plot your future.
Looking over your trove of information, mark or set aside everything you'd like to attend, without concern over date, location, time, or cost. This is your wish list.
Next, enter potential events into your free, LittleViews online calendar. Don't worry about conflicting times or over-booking days. You can analyze the details later.
To keep track of an event wish-list, mark those items as "uncommitted." They appear in the monthly and weekly calendars with question marks (?) in front of their names. Pluses (+) represent committed events, and greater-than wedges (>) indicate finished events.
Don't worry about overlap! Look at the Weekly Calendar sample. The idea is to post all the events you'd like to see, and once entered, you can judge how they stack up against one another. Delete the ones you don't want and have fun with the remainder.
It's also nice to see all of your event interests together on a list (see sample above). This helps you better understand yourself and where you're going intellectually, a clue as to the types of friends you'll attract!
With your research behind you, a good way to handle email, and an easy tool like your personal LittleViews online calendar, you not only can make plans, you have a way to follow them.
The result? No more lost dates, unmanageable clutter, or forgotten opportunities!
Questions or comments?
Karen Little
Article by Karen Little. First published on 9/3/2003. All rights reserved by www.Littleviews.com.
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