Build your first run sheet

Start with one real event

Make a project and name it after something that is actually happening — this Sunday's service, next weekend's showcase. A project holds everything for one event: its checklists, its reference pages, its drawings and its files.

Resist the urge to build a template first. The general version of a run sheet is much harder to write than the specific one, and the specific one is the one you can check against reality. Generalise later, once you have run the sheet twice and know which steps people actually stumble on.

Write the steps in the order you walk the room

Add a checklist and put the steps in, one line each, in the order someone physically moves: booth, stage, front of house. Don't stop to explain anything yet. Getting the sequence right is the whole job, and it is much easier to see when the list is short lines.

Group them into sections once you have twenty or so — Booth, Stage, Before doors. Sections fold away, but the numbering runs straight through them, so step 7 is step 7 no matter which section it lives in. That matters the moment someone says it out loud over a radio.

Explain only the steps that need it

Open a step and add its details where a volunteer would otherwise have to guess or come and find you. Most steps need nothing. The ones that do usually need one of three things:

• A picture of what it should look like when it is right — drag the photo straight onto the editor.
• A drawing, for the things a photograph can't show: what plugs into what, where the console goes.
• The order something has to happen in, and what breaks if it doesn't. Amps after the console, never before.

Write these for the person who has done this once, six weeks ago. Not for yourself, and not for someone who has never seen the room.

Put the reference material somewhere else

There is always material that doesn't get checked off — how the system is wired, who to call when the projector won't wake, the quirk with the second wireless pack. That belongs in a doc, not in a step. A step is something you do once and tick; a doc is something you look at when you need it.

You can link a step to a doc, so the step stays one line and the explanation is one click away rather than in the way.

Hand it over

Export the checklist as HTML. You get one web page that opens in any browser, with the pictures and the typeface carried inside it, so it works off a memory stick in a building with no wifi. Checkboxes save in the browser they were ticked in, and it prints without folding anything away.

Send it the evening before. Then watch what happens on the day: the steps people ask about are the steps that need a picture, and that is how the second version of the sheet gets written.

What to do next

Run the sheet once for real before adding anything to it. The most common mistake is writing detail nobody needed while missing the one step that actually goes wrong.

Back to tutorials