Frequently Asked Questions (Alpha Edition)
How do I add an event?
There are two ways:
- Send (forward) an email you get about an event to uneventful@natesullivan.com. If it contains an event that isn’t already in your account, you’ll see it show up in a few minutes.
- Click Create Event from the Home Screen and fill in the dialog that appears.
It might take 10-20 seconds for Uneventful to process an event email. If you don’t see an event in there after you send one, double check the email address you used to send it. Also, Uneventful tries not to create duplicate events, so make sure it’s not already in your account.
If there is missing information in your event (date, location, etc.), you can either add it manually by clicking the Edit Event icon next to the name of your event.
You can also forward additional emails. In theory, if you just dump all of your event emails into Uneventful, eventually you should have a pretty accurate picture of your events.
How do I delete an event?
To delete an event, click the Edit Event icon mentioned above, and then choose “Delete Event” from the pop-up. Keep in mind there’s no undo yet, so think long and hard about this.
Also, if you don’t see an event anymore but don’t think you deleted it, remember that events will disappear from your Home Screen once their date has passed unless you have “Show Old Events” checked. This is on by default, but if you turn it off you won’t see events from the past.
What's the difference between an Event and a Deadline?
In Uneventful, an Event is the actual thing you are going to or participating in, like a trade show or a conference. Deadlines are individual tasks you need to get done for that Event by some date, usually well before the date of the Event itself.
For instance, you may have a trade show on October 15th (event), but you need to have your booth arrive at the show by October 12th (deadline), and you may need to have your attendees registered by September 20th (deadline).
If you are going to a really fancy, multi-day Event with a lot of huge things in it, for now you may want to treat them as separate Events. For instance, there’s a big multi-day show (Event), and on the 4th day there’s a 5k race with an entirely separate set of deadlines.
In my experience, your boss (which could also be you) will mostly care about your list of Events, and whether you are “ready” for them. However, you (or maybe someone who works for you if you’re lucky) will mostly think about your Deadlines list, because that’s the actual work that has to be done.
How do I add expenses?
To add an expense, just scroll down to the Expenses section of the Home Screen, type in a name and an amount, and click Add Expense. This will associate your expense with the currently selected event, so make sure you have it selected when you add your expense.
If you click the big Edit button next an expense, you can information like whether the expense is being invoiced or is something you need to reimbursed for. You can also associate an expense with a certain deadline (for example, if you have a “Order Internet Access” deadline, you can associate the actual expense with it). If you like doing this, you can even create an expense directly from a Deadline — this will automatically associate it with that Deadline.
The point of all this is that it should be really easy for you to get a sense of what it costs to go to an event, and why. Uneventful is going to get a bunch of reporting features soon, and they will use this information to make all of this obvious (and interesting!).
What are "People" for and how should I use them?
Uneventful allows you to manage who is going to what, and eventually, keep track of everything they need to be successful at your event. These people could be sales people, operations people, you, executives, or anyone else — but in general it refers to people you have to think about. If someone is going to be there and just do whatever they want and require nothing from you, they probably don’t need to be in here.
“Who is going to _____?”, or “Am I going to ______?”, or “I am all set for ______?” are questions I got a lot as our events coordinator of last resort, and the People feature should make those a lot easier to answer. For example, on the People screen, you’ll see a list of everyone you’re keeping track of and which events you’re expecting them to attend. You can also add or remove someone to/from any of your events from right there on that screen.
In addition to People, Uneventful also keeps track of “Locations”, which can mean “offices” if you want, but in an increasingly remote world really just means “different places where people who work here are based out of”.
In the future, Uneventful will be connecting People to other new features, like “Assets”, where you can manage things like signage, collateral, and other things People might have with them, or have stored in different Locations.
