How to Survive Event FOMO

Picture this: Your team has been talking about the big week for months – no, since last year. When they speak of Dreamforce, you think of some science fiction movie or series, like Star Trek or Power Rangers. The big week has arrived, and now you’re sitting face-to-face with an empty calendar and all the time in the world while your favorite people are roaming around downtown San Francisco (and posting pictures to boot).

So how do you address the boredom, the envy, the sheer sadness of being left behind (not really but maybe just a little)? You scroll through it. But it doesn’t help to log into Twitter (gosh – I mean X) or Instagram or LinkedIn to see all of these people posting about performers like P!nk and The Lumineers (Lumineers who?), minigolf courses, and characters that look like they belong in a theme park. Even the Wall Street Journal, which you read for the first time in weeks, has an article about Salesforce. 

Ok, fine! I’ll get to work. So what does one do while half the company is out, when the FOMO is out of control?

• Finally hit the publish button on the case study, then share it in the public Slack channel – I mean I’m not the only one left behind (and what a great time for those reps to catch up on what success looks like!) 
• Fix the speed of the website’s back-end – a boring job but nothing a little podcast / background music can’t help. With your speakers freed up from Zoom the world of Spotify is your oyster. 
• Obsessively check the website analytics and notice that everyone is reading your content about – you guessed it – Dreamforce. Wait, does this mean I did get to participate in Dreamforce, even if from afar??
• Closely examine every incoming lead coming in from Dreamforce. Wait, that lead is from MY content – wahoo! 
• Ask the mailman about his day when you go to get your package 
• Sit outside and read the latest from TechCrunch while on your lunch break, enjoying the beautiful weather and hills 
• Look at pictures your team sends you of the amazing set-up in their event space and brainstorm what the next event could benefit from 
• Attend a barre class you’ve been trying to get to for months, then talk your non-techie friend’s ear off about cloud marketplaces at happy hour (“What’s the cloud?”), while she tells you about the marketing strategy for opening a restaurant on the rooftop of Madame Tussauds Hollywood Wax Museum. I mean if you’re going to network in San Francisco over free drinks, I can at least enjoy a few with the “stars”. 
• Binge listen to 5 hours worth of sales calls and identify where prospects are leaning in so you can create a guide for when selling gets back to “non-Dreamforce normal” 
• Remember those dozen webinars you signed up for and didn’t attend because you were 100% going to listen to the recording? Well now’s your chance to lean in and learn (at 1.25x speed) 
• Enjoy the feeling of not receiving a single Slack notification all afternoon. Don’t judge yourself if you refresh and check just to make sure you didn’t miss something. 
• Find time to engage and enable the folks left behind. You’re a band of brothers and sisters now, left alone to hold down the fort while the rest of the company is off to slay the Salesforce dragon. Use this time to drum up fun ideas on engaging audiences outside of Dreamforce.
• Get a head start on the follow up for your Dreamforce team – draft quick LinkedIn messages they could copy and paste, follow up emails, dream up webinars and collateral that could fit perfectly in a post-Dreamforce follow up nurture series. 
• Take some time to reflect on all the ways you DID help the team succeed at Dreamforce. That blog you wrote, that asset you proofread and formatted, those new SEO keywords you played around with, the AppExchange audit you helped with to make sure things were in tip top shape. 

Coincidentally, I had an excuse to visit San Francisco: my best friend’s baby shower. So I booked the first flight out of LAX to SFO and landed at the tail end of the Dreamforce action. 

My friend scooped me up at the airport and I dropped my bags off in West Portal before hopping on the MUNI towards downtown, where all the Dreamforce attendees congregate. 

Just a few blocks away from my first apartment in the city, back when each block was full of new startups, I stumbled into the Four Seasons, where my team was eating breakfast, and got to experience just a fleeting moment of Dreamforce – including a bump in with Dreamfest headliner, Imagine Dragons. 

So maybe I didn’t experience that much FOMO after all.

My top tips for overcoming event FOMO

• Don’t take it personally – we had all the right people in place, and my time was better spent enhancing other projects for when Dreamforce was over
• Spend time with other colleagues who aren’t attending, especially if you don’t get the chance to talk to them often 
• Change your routine – go to the afternoon workout class you’ve been curious about instead of working through lunch
• Mix up your playlist or podcast – instead of listening to meetings, explore a topic or genre of music you’ve been curious about 
• Hit up a friend who works in your industry (e.g., B2B tech) or in your speciality (e.g., marketing or content) and chat through new ideas from a different perspective
• Take your time – rather than rush through a day stacked with meetings, take a moment to read that article you’ve had bookmarked, message a former colleague on LinkedIn, share a new recipe on the fun Slack channel, or read a chapter of that business strategy book that’s been collecting dust
• Embrace self-care – since you’re camera off, maybe it’s the perfect day to put on a face mask while you check your emails
• Support your colleagues by liking/commenting on their LinkedIn posts and reacting to their Slack messages – sure, they are having all the fun, but they’re also marathoning through one of the most exhausting weeks of their year and could use all of the moral support they can get 
• Get ready to work when they return – you’ve put a lot into the biggest event of the year. Now it’s time to make the most of those new relationships