Activities overrun. Great topics emerge and you have to choose what to cut. All while trying to stay on schedule and finish on time. There’s a lot for facilitators to keep track of!

We heard time and time again that facilitators like you wanted a simple way to stay on time while delivering their workshops.

Now, you can use SessionLab to keep track of time and make changes when running your sessions!

With Time Tracker, you can start tracking time in your sessions with a single click.

See exactly where you are in your agenda with our automatic timer. Add extra time if an activity runs over and quickly adjust your plans during the workshop. You can even compare your original plan with what was actually delivered when you’re done!

SessionLab was built to help save you time when designing your workshops and meetings. Now you can use SessionLab to stay on time when delivering your sessions too!

Our mission is to help facilitators design and run amazing workshops. Time Tracker is the next step on that journey.

Keep track of time during your workshop

When you start Time Tracker, the timer moves through your agenda automatically. No need to manually set timers or try to keep track in your head.

Wondering whether it’s time to start closing a group discussion or if you have time for another topic? You can see exactly where you are in your agenda and how long you have left for each activity.

Time Tracker makes it easy to stay on schedule so you can focus on the group, not on the clock.

Adjust your schedule as you go

Staying organized as plans change can be demanding. With Time Tracker, it’s easy to adjust your agenda during the workshop and still finish on time.

Want to give participants extra time in their breakout sessions? Add extra time to any activity with a single click.

Need to know how much time you need to make up? Time Tracker shows you how you’re performing against schedule, so you can adjust in the moment and stay on time.

Compare your actual session to what you planned

Many workshops and meetings change in the moment. Reflecting on what went to plan and what emerged with the group means you can make adjustments for the future.

With Time Tracker, you can keep both your original and delivered agenda. Compare how much time you planned with how much time you actually used.

Leave notes for later reflection so you can improve your facilitation process and create more effective agendas.

Stay in sync with your co-facilitators

Whether you’re running a live, virtual or hybrid session, staying in sync with your collaborators is vital for delivering a great workshop experience.

With Time Tracker, you and your co-facilitators can all see where you’re at in your schedule and use it to inform your process.

If you’re running late, everyone can see how much time you need to make up and adjust the schedule in real time.

Whether you’re in the room together or working virtually, Time Tracker gives you the confidence to make changes and stay aligned.

What else do I need to know?

• If you’re a Pro or Team customer, you can access Time Tracker by clicking Start Session in the Session Planner. Our automatic timer will begin moving through your agenda with the timings you’ve already set!
• If you’re using SessionLab’s free plan, you can upgrade to Pro to unlock Time Tracker and a host of other benefits including real-time collaboration, unlimited sessions, and sharing sessions with clients.
  
  Want to try Time Tracker but your Pro trial expired? Get in touch here to ask to reactivate your trial period.
• Are you a new customer who wants to use Time Tracker? Sign-up to SessionLab here to get an extended 30-day trial!
• Need help getting the most from Time Tracker? You can see our full help documentation here or get in touch with our friendly support team. We’ll be happy to help!

What’s next?

We built Time Tracker based on the requests and input of our users. We’re listening to every piece of feedback and want to build the best tool for your needs.

We plan to release further updates to Time Tracker and want your help to make it the best way to track time and support you when delivering your sessions.

Try Time Tracker during your next workshop or meeting and let us know what you think. We can’t wait to hear from you!

Whether you are printing out your workshop agendas on paper or exporting to PDF to share digitally, we have some exciting news for you!

We made an early release (Beta) of the totally new print and export experience inspired by your feedback. It has 3 new presets to choose from (+ we moved the old one as well to the new interface) giving you a greater variety of options for how you want to share your agenda with others. As this is an early release, we would love to hear your feedback on how to improve it further:

• Export the high-level agenda: the first new print preset, Day Overview, includes only the timing and titles of your blocks, perfect for sharing with clients or participants that do not need all the details.

• Print several days on the same page: the new Multi-Day Overview preset is ideal if you want a high-level export of a multi-day session. It will help you see a complete overview of the entire session, similar to how you see them in the Multi Plan View.

• Print only a single day of a multi-day session: Gone are the times when you had to print all days and then remove pages for the days you don’t need – simply select the day you want to print!

• Get the old printout format and all the customization options with Agenda & Details preset or use the Details preset if you want to print just the details of the blocks without the agenda in a table view.

• More useful settings: apart from the new export presets, the whole experience of export has been improved by saving your last used settings and offering more options like selecting landscape/portrait orientation and showing/hiding the fields you don’t need in the more detailed print presets.

Besides the new export options, we also improved the way to manage Groups of Blocks:

• Description for Groups of Blocks: If you have thematically connected blocks in your session it is practical to group them together so you can move and reuse them easier. Now you can add a Description, Goals, Materials, Instructions and Attachments to the Groups you create in your sessions.

• Add Groups to your Library: Do you have a favourite sequence of activities that you often reuse in your sessions? Now you can add complete groups of blocks to your library to make it easier to find and reuse sequences for your next session!

Do you have other feedback or requests on how to make SessionLab perfect for you? 

Just hit reply and let us know :-)

Workshop planning on mobile devices

Up until recently SessionLab’s workshop planner tool lacked a mobile-friendly version. We know a few determined people who kept using it on mobile devices (ourselves included), but it was far from a decent experience. 

Now the struggle is over, meet the new mobile version of SessionLab:

As a first step, we decided to focus on making the web application mobile friendly, so what you get are not dedicated iOS and Android apps, but a version that works well from a web browser on your mobile phone. Thus no restrictions on operating systems.

The mobile-friendly interface now enables you to overview and navigate the session content more easily, drag-and-drop your blocks and edit all the details

Is this the final effort for a better mobile version? No. In our perspective, this was a much needed big first step to allow you to edit sessions on the go, or just look up what’s next in your agenda during the break in a workshop.

With some of the future features on our roadmap that are more oriented for cases where you use SessionLab on your phone (typically during or right after a workshop) we might refine the current version or move forward with dedicated mobile apps.

In the meantime, if you have any thoughts on how to make the mobile version work better for you, we’d love to hear from you!

Edit block details in Multi Plan View

Are you designing a session that spans multiple days? Or do you just want to compare two different workshop agendas you’ve prepared? This is easy to do in the Multi Plan View which allows you to have a high-level overview (just the titles of your blocks and their timings) of different sessions on one screen. 

But if you actually wanted to work on your agenda and describe what you want to do in each module of your session, then you always had to go back to the single day view to edit block details.

Now you don’t need to go back and forth between Single and Multi Plan View anymore when you want to add details to your facilitation plan while keeping an overview of the whole session flow over multiple days. Just click on the ‘Open’ button on any of your block in Multi Plan View, and you are able to edit all block details.

Rich-text formatting for session descriptions

We received a lot of requests asking for the possibility of formatting in the session descriptions. Now this is also enabled, so you can do a lot neat things, for example:

• Add a bullet point list of your session objectives
• Highlight any important details for yourself or for your client by using bold or italic formatting
• Create hyperlinks to point to relevant resources

The formatting you add for your session description will also be shown properly on the PDF and Word printouts you’re creating.

Restore a deleted session 

No more stress if you accidentally delete a session. Gone are the days with no recovery option. Now your session won’t be immediately and permanently deleted, but instead it will be archived and you will have 30 days to restore your session from the Trash, before it gets permanently deleted.

Copy-paste and keep the formatting

If you used to copy-paste the text description you added to your blocks, you probably found it annoying that any formatting you had was removed when pasting the content.

Now you already copy-paste content between blocks and keep the formatting. What’s more, you can even paste into your blocks from external resources, and the supported rich-text formatting (bold, underline, italics, bullet points and numbered lists) will be kept automatically – hurray!

Sort session materials sequentially

If you add materials to your session blocks, they get summarised under your session information and on the printout. So far the list of materials in your session were sorted alphabetically, and now we’ve introduced the ability to sort the materials sequentially so they’re listed in the order they appear in your session. This way you can choose if you want your materials sorted alphabetically or sequentially.

Multiple comment threads for session blocks

From now on you can have more than one thread of comments for the blocks in your session. When replying to comments made on a block, you can decide if you want to start a new comment thread associated with that block, or reply on the existing thread.

Block categories are synced in multi-day sessions

You were already able to customise the colour coding you use to indicate the different types of interaction for your blocks. This allowed you to change and add categories in each session, however, if you had a session with multiple days, then each day-session would have its own set of block categories.

We received a lot of feedback which said that this was less than ideal, and that you’d expect that any changes you make to the categories in one day of a multi day session would be reflected in the other days too.Block categories are now synced between days of a multi-day session. If you have a multi-day session and you customise the colour-coding of your block categories on one day, it will get updated automatically for all other days of that multi-day session.

We hope you’re finding the new improvements useful! If you have any feedback or suggestions on what you miss from SessionLab, we’d love to hear from you!

Breakout sessions a.k.a. parallel tracks!

If you are planning a session and you want to split up your agenda into multiple tracks, you can now create parallel tracks by adding a breakout session block.

Breakout session blocks offer several useful features for more complex workshop such as:

• Overview of parallel tracks – see several tracks at once and move blocks between the tracks
• Track duplication – easily make copies of a track
• Timing adjusted to the longest track – the length of the breakout session block is automatically adjusted to the length of the longest track, ensuring your schedule runs smoothly (or warning you when there are potential overlaps)
• Each track visible in the exports – as with the regular sessions, the agenda of each track will be included in the PDF printout and Word export

Find out more about how to create, adjust or remove breakout tracks in our support center.

This new feature is available on Pro and Team subscriptions. Go ahead and check it out at www.sessionlab.com

Ever since we released the first version of SessionLab, we received many requests to develop a better option to create multi-day agendas.

It is a frequent scenario that a workshop or training session spans longer than a day, and previously the only option was to create two separate sessions for each day and then trying to manage them together in the multi-plan view. That was certainly a cumbersome way to deal with such sessions.

We are happy to announce that support for multi-day agendas is now available in SessionLab!

With the new feature, you can open separate days (day-sessions) under a session if you want to design a session that spans over multiple days. Each new day is displayed on a different tab, and you are able to display your whole multi-day session in the multi-plan view with one click.

A multi-day session is treated as one session on your dashboard, and when you invite collaborators for your multi-day session, then your collaborators automatically get access to all day-sessions as well.

In this post, we want to give you some tips for how to use this new feature. You can skip to the relevant use cases if you want to:

• Create a multi-day agenda
• Merge already existing session plans into a new multi-day session
• Add any existing session plans into an existing multi-day session
• Remove a day-session from a multi-day session into a separate session plan

Additionally, you can find a few pro tips about how to:

• Rename your days
• Change the order of your days
• Invite collaborators
• Delete a day from your multi-day session

Create a multi-day agenda

In order to create a multi-day session, you first need to create a simple session or open an existing session plan. You will find an ‘Add day’ button under the session’s name in the header.

When you click on this button, it will result in the following:

• Your initial single-day plan becomes a day-session named ‘Day 1’
• A new day-session name ‘Day 2’ gets created.

You just need to click on the day you want to work on and create your first blocks. If you want to create further days, just click on the ‘Add day’ button.

Merge already existing session plans into one multi-day session

You can merge any existing session plans into one multi-day session. This might be particularly useful if you previously created separate sessions for a workshop that spanned over several days.

In order to do it, first, open one of the sessions you want to merge and navigate to the Multi Plan View.

Once you are in the Multi Plan View, load the other sessions you want to be merged by clicking on Open session button and selecting the session.

When you opened the session(s) you want to merge, click on More options icon and select the Join multi-day option: (If you have multiple sessions open in the Multi Plan View, you are able to select which one you want to merge with)

As a result, a multi-day session is created that automatically took the name of the first day-session. You can simply change the name of the multi-day session here in the Multi Plan view, and also change the name of the day-sessions if you click on the Edit icon.

Add any existing session plans into an existing multi-day session

If you want to add any of your already existing session plans into an existing multi-day session, then you should follow the same process as when merging sessions: open the sessions in the Multi Plan View, and on the session you want to merge, select the Join multi-day option.

Remove a day-session from a multi-day session into a separate session plan

You can extract a day from your multi-day session in the Multi Plan View to become a single session. Just click on the further options icon under the day-session’s name, and select the option ‘Extract’.

Rename your days

The new day-sessions you create are automatically assigned a name, but you can change that, together with adding a description and a date for the day-session.

You can rename a day-session two ways. One way is to open the day-session and click on the Info tab on the right side. You can find here the description of the multi-day session at the top, and the description of the day-session under that.

When you create a multi-day session, the day-sessions will automatically inherit the client and tags from the multi-day (parent) session, but not the description. So if you want to change any of this information for the day session, just click on ‘Edit info’.

Now you are able to change the name, date, client, tags and description of the day-session.

Tip: The date of the multi-day session is always computed from the dates of the day-sessions: it will show a range of the earliest and latest day-session’s date.

When you finished editing, just click on ‘Done’. Your changes are automatically saved as you type, so if you navigate away without clicking on Done, your changes will stay saved.

Change the order of your days

The order of your days are automatically calculated from the date of your sessions: the one with the earliest date will be the first and the one with the latest date will be the last one. If you haven’t filled out the date for your day-sessions, then further algorithms will order them based on their name (considering if there is any kind of numbering that indicates an order). If you want to change that, the easiest way is to assign the proper dates for your sessions.

Invite collaborators

When you invite collaborators for a multi-day session, then the collaborator rights you assign will be applied for each day-session. In the current version, there is no opportunity to set different collaborator rights for the day-sessions.

If you merge different session together into one multi-day session, then the collaborator rights will be added up to the multi-day session and then populated back to each day-session. If you want to merge Session A where you invited Frank as editor, and Session B where you invited Anna as viewer, then Frank will become an editor and Anna will become a viewer of both the multi-day session and for its day-sessions Session A and Session B.

When you remove a collaborator from the multi-day session, then consequently she will be removed from all day-sessions as well. (Since there is no support yet for differentiated collaborator rights per day-session).

Delete a day from your multi-day session

You can delete a day from your multi-day session in the Multi Plan View. Just click on the further options icon under the day-session’s name, and select the option ’Delete’.

We hope you found this short support article useful to get started with creating and managing multi-day sessions in SessionLab. If you have any questions, just write us at support@sessionlab.com

Now we are happy to announce the new redesigned dashboard as the solution to always stay on top of what’s happening on your own or in your team’s workspace!

What’s new there?

1) New views (Recent, Personal, Your Team) help you to find your sessions: you get an easy overview of what is in your Personal and in your Team workspaces. Besides, you can find a Recent view where you can always see your 24 most recently modified sessions where you are a collaborator at, regardless of which workspace they are located at.

Tips:

• The Recent view shows session from your whole account, regardless of which workspace and folder they are located in. Since this view only displays sessions, the folders are not displayed here, and you cannot create folders while being in the Recent view
• The Recent view shows only those sessions where you are invited as a collaborator. (While in your Team workspace view, you can see all sessions under your Team account, even if you are not invited to the session as a collaborator)

2) List layout, where sessions are shown in a table, is now available in addition to the grid layout with cards so it becomes easier to have an overview of your sessions at one glance.

3) Folders are allowing you to group sessions together and structure your workspace. Viewing and creating folders is support in the Personal and Team workspace views.

You can create a Folder by navigating to your Personal or Team workspace, and clicking on the New Folder button in the upper right corner:

How to rename sessions

There are various ways to rename folders are sessions. If you want to do it on the Dashboard, then click on the Edit Info button of the folder or session (in grid view). The Edit info button will only be available for the folders and sessions where you are the owner or you have editor rights.

The same renaming option is also available in list view, with the exception that you cannot edit the session description since it is not displayed in list view. Nonetheless, you can adjust the name, date, client and tags of the sessions, and the name of folders.

How to duplicate a session?

Have you ever wanted to create a copy of any of your previous sessions, so you can use it for a new session design without compromising the original version? You can do it easily on the dashboard.

In grid view:

In list view:

Workspaces and folders – Where do my sessions get created?

As a Basic or Pro user of SessionLab, you have access to one workspace: your Personal workspace. As a consequence of this, all the sessions you create will automatically be created in your Personal workspace.

If you create a session while being in the Recent view, the session will automatically be placed in the root of your Personal workspace. If you create a session while being in a folder in your Personal workspace, then the session will be created in the folder.

Don’t worry, you can easily move your session within your folder structure, see below in the section about moving sessions.

If you are member of a Team account in SessionLab, then you also get access to the Team’s workspace, beyond your own Personal workspace. In this case, if you are in the Recent view, the default workspace where your sessions get created is your Team’s workspace.

If you are not in the Recent view, but either in your Team’s or your Personal workspace, or any of their subfolders, then the session you create will get created at the workspace and folder where you were located when pressing the New Folder button.

How to see which workspace does a session of mine belong to?

If you are within the view of your Personal or Team workspace, then naturally you only see the sessions belonging to that workspace. However, you might ask, how do I know which workspace does my session belong to, if I am in the Recent view or if I have already opened the session?

You can find the answer in the collaborators’ list. If you see a Team logo listed among the collaborators, it means that the session belongs to that team’s workspace. If you do not see a Team logo among the collaborators, it means that the session can be found at your Personal workspace

You also can find the same information if you open the session, and navigate to the Collaborator tab on the right side menu:

You can see on the screenshot above that this session belongs to the workspace of “My Team”, and therefore all members of the team account has the right to view this session.

How to move sessions and folders?

You can do it easily on the dashboard by clicking on the More options icon on the session card, clicking on Move and selecting the destination folder.

In grid view:

In list view:

The activity indicator

Always stay up-to-date with what happened in your sessions: an activity indicator marks your session if it has been edited by your colleagues while you were away. See the orange dot on the screenshots below:

The indicator is also available in list view:

We hope you found this short support article useful to get the most out of the new dashboard in SessionLab. If you have any questions, just write us at support@sessionlab.com

• Let your text become rich! – not only in content but also in format. Rich-text formatting is now available in the session planner, so you can apply bold, italic, underline and bullet point formatting in any section of your session blocks.
• Get to know in a glance if any of your sessions has been changed while you were away. If you work collaboratively on session plans, and your collaborators edit your session or make a comment while you are away, then an activity indicator ● will be shown on your homepage on the session card. Combine it with sorting sessions by ‘Modified date’, and you never miss an update of your sessions.

We also came up with a set of improvements in the library:

• Commenting in library: Have you used a facilitation method from a library and you have feedback for it? By making comments on the library content you can start a conversation, share your feedback and build a living knowledge base of facilitation methods and practice.
• Difficulty indicator: when you want to use a method you found in the library, wouldn’t it be good to know how difficult is this method to use from the author’s perspective? Now a 3-level indicator helps you to understand whether a particular method can be easily applied, or requires advanced skills to deliver.
• New field in library to store background information: add historical development, references or any other bits of information that is not delivery-related. This enables you to keep the instructions field focused on the delivery-related information. Importantly, instructions are included on the session printout while background information is not.

Go ahead and check them out at www.sessionlab.com!

In the past weeks we’ve been busy improving the ‘behind the scenes’ part of SessionLab. As a result we got a faster and a more reliable platform than ever before. Of course, we included some new features as well that we know you’ve been looking forward to:

• Mark your client for each session: Now you have a dedicated field to enter a client of a specific session. This can help you filter your sessions and find the ones assigned to specific clients more easily.
• Less crowded dashboard: If you have a lot of sessions on the dashboard, now you will only see the 10 most recent in each group (your own sessions, the ones shared with you and your team’s sessions). The rest you can retrieve by clicking Load more.
• Find and sort sessions: A new toolbar lets you quickly find a session by it’s name, description, tags, collaborators or the new client field. Whatever you enter will filter all the sessions on the dashboard, showing only the ones that match the criteria. You can also sort by session date, last modified time or alphabetically by name.
• More paper size options: Besides the standard A4 size paper printout, now you can also choose US Letter or Legal paper size for your PDF printouts.

Go ahead and check them out at www.sessionlab.com!

These are the first improvements in the line of many that we’re planning to help you organise your sessions better. Therefore, your feedback is more than welcome so please leave a comment.

Stay tuned for our next announcement. Hint: we are working on rebranding SessionLab so soon you can get to know the new name for the app!

• Your Private and Team Libraries of facilitation resources: Do you have some favourite methods or exercises that you often (re)use in your sessions? Now you can add them to your dedicated Private Library in SessionLab, so you can quickly find them next time you want to use them! If you work in a team, a new Team Library can be handy to have a shared knowledge base of facilitation methods within your team!
• Add resources to library from your sessions: Next time you feel you have just created a block in one of your session worthy to be saved for later, just select Add to library… and you can store it as resource in your Private, Team’s or Public Library.
• Share your session plans with clients without a SessionLab account: If you want to show your session plan to someone without forcing them to create a SessionLab account (or sending a printout in PDF), you can now do it by creating and sharing a link to your session. By default your sessions are still private and you can enable the shareable link from the Collaborators sidebar for each session.

Go ahead and check it all out at www.sessionlab.com!

We’re looking forward to further improving both the public and private libraries of SessionLab to make them even more useful knowledge base for your session preparations. We’d love to hear your feedback and ideas!

Here are the detailed descriptions of the new goodies:

• Real-time collaboration and editor rights: When you invite a collaborator for your workshop or training plan now you can work together at the same time on your plan. To do that you can give the new editor role to your collaborators which will allow them to edit all the plan details. The viewer role still remains for cases when you want to give only view and commenting rights to collaborators.  Furthermore, you can see the changes anybody makes instantaneously as well as visual indicators showing who is currently online and which blocks of the plan are they working on.
• See past changes: To help you have an overview of what changes were done to your plan we added the activity log to the planner sidebar. This is especially useful when someone was working on the plan while you were away.
• Bigger text size and more options on printouts: Was the text on the printout of your plan too small to be useful during the delivery of your session? Or maybe you wanted the list of materials (part of extra block information we added in the last update) in your plan? New printout options come to the rescue. Switch between 3 different font sizes, select what information you want to see in the table or chose if you want to include extra information below the table.

Go ahead and check it all out at www.sessionlab.com!

In the meantime we are working on new features to support needs assessment and evaluations for your session plans. We’d love to hear you feedback on these features so hit the comments below.