Leave the gaps in
Every empty slot on the agenda feels like wasted money, so we fill it. The events people enjoy most are usually the ones with a bit of air left in them.
By FrontHAUS Team · Editorial
Part of the Running a better event guide →
Look at most event agendas and you'll see the same instinct at work. Every fifteen minutes accounted for. Session straight into session, lunch trimmed to forty minutes so a panel can fit, the last speaker still going as the cleaners hover at the back. Nobody plans it to feel breathless. It just happens, because an empty slot on the run sheet looks like money not being used.
I'd push back on that. The gaps aren't waste. They're where a lot of the value actually happens.
Think about your own experience of a long day out. By mid-afternoon, if you've been herded from one room to the next without a moment to yourself, you stop absorbing anything. You're present in body and gone in attention. The speaker after the lunch lull is talking to a room of people quietly working out their evening commute. No amount of good content survives an audience that's run out of capacity to take it in.
A break is not dead time. It's when two people who sat near each other in a session finally introduce themselves. It's when someone finds a quiet corner, answers the email that's been nagging them, and comes back actually able to listen again. The conversations that justify the whole event tend to happen in the gaps, not the sessions, and if you've planned the gaps away then you've planned away the best part.
There's a wellness angle to this too, and it's not soft. People are more honest about needing it now. A quiet space with no programme in it, somewhere to sit that isn't a networking opportunity in disguise, water that isn't a fight to reach. These things cost very little and they change how the day feels in the body, which is most of how people remember it.
We worked on a two-day summit last year where the client's first draft had nine sessions on day one. We talked them down to six, stretched the breaks, and built in a proper quiet room off to the side that had nothing scheduled in it at all. The feedback afterwards singled out the calm of it. Same venue, fewer things, and people left less frazzled and more inclined to come back.
So when you're staring at the run sheet and there's a thirty-minute hole that's tempting to fill, try leaving it. Protect a long lunch like it's a headline act. The day will breathe, your guests will stay with you to the end, and they'll remember it as time well spent rather than a marathon they survived.