Webinar Checklist: One Live Session, from a Week Before to Right After

Preparing a webinar comes down to four things — content, equipment, attendee communication, and the run-of-show — spread across four moments: a week before, the day before, one hour before, and right after. A live session can’t be paused once it starts, so whatever you missed shows up in front of everyone.

The list below assumes a 60- to 90-minute live class or webinar that you run alone. If you repeat it for each cohort or session, treat it as a list you keep fixing, not one you use once.

One thing first: rehearse to the end with the real tools

Clicking through your slides isn’t a rehearsal. Open the tool you’ll actually use, share your screen, and say it out loud to the end. Time it.

Three things come out of a rehearsal: how long it really takes, where the screen switching gets tangled, and which slide you can’t explain smoothly. None of them come out of thinking about it.

The checklist

A week before

• Write in one sentence what attendees should be able to do when it ends
• Finish the draft of the slides and exercise materials
• Rehearse once and time it — if it runs over, cut
• Write five expected questions and their answers (below)
• Send the details: join link, date and time, what to have ready
• Decide whether you’ll share a recording, and where

The day before

• Freeze the materials — no edits on the morning of
• Open the exercise file on another device and another account
• Click the join link yourself and go in
• Send the evening-before reminder
• Put the run-of-show and the response table on one page
• Decide your backups — spare mic, phone tethering, a PDF of the slides

One hour before

• Restart the computer and close the apps and tabs you won’t use
• Turn off notifications — chat, mail, calendar
• Check mic, camera, and lighting; record 30 seconds and watch it
• Switch to a wired connection or your most stable Wi-Fi
• Share your screen once — decide which window you’ll share
• Send the one-hour reminder
• Put water, the run-of-show, and your prepared answers within reach

Ten minutes before

• Open the room and put up a holding slide — start time, how to check sound
• Check the recording settings
• Ask the first people in whether sound and screen are fine

During

• Right after you start, press record
• In the first three minutes, tell them today’s order and how to ask questions
• Check the time against the run-of-show at each section
• Ten minutes before the end, tell them the next action — assignment, materials, next date

Within 30 minutes after

• Write down the questions that clustered — what, how many people, on which slide
• Write down where you got stuck and which sections ran off schedule
• Write down the questions you couldn’t answer, and set the date you’ll reply
• Send the recording, materials, and a thank-you
• Put two or three changes for next time into the materials

How to prepare for questions

The shakiest moment of a live session is taking questions. Prepare, and it becomes the most credible one.

• Five is enough. Questions that actually came up last time are the best material. If it’s your first, start with things like “how do I apply this at work,” “what does it cost,” “does it work for beginners.”
• One paragraph and one example per answer. Write more and you won’t be able to read it live.
• Decide what you do when no one asks. “If five seconds pass with no question, then I raise the most common question from the last cohort myself.”
• Decide what you do when you don’t know. “If I can’t answer right away, then I write it down and say I’ll send the answer by tomorrow.”

We covered the if-then form of those last two lines in Implementation Intentions.

A response table for when things break

There’s no time to think during a live session. One line written in advance stands in for that time.

If this happens	Do this
Someone says they can’t hear me	Switch to the spare mic and post “give me 30 seconds” in chat
Screen sharing fails	Post the slide PDF link in chat and carry on by voice
The internet drops	Rejoin on phone tethering; if I’m not back in two minutes, post on the announcement channel
A section runs more than ten minutes over	Skip one example in the next section
More than half the room is stuck on the exercise	Stop the exercise and do it together on my screen

A premortem helps when you build this table for the first time. The reasons that come out of “this webinar went badly — why?” become the left column as is.

The run-of-show: 60 minutes on one page

Time	What happens
0:00 – 0:03	Welcome, today’s order, how to ask questions
0:03 – 0:10	Why this topic — one case
0:10 – 0:30	Core content (three chunks)
0:30 – 0:45	Demo or exercise
0:45 – 0:55	Questions and answers
0:55 – 1:00	Next action, materials, close

Leave Q&A as “whatever’s left at the end” and it’s the first thing to disappear when the front runs long. Give it a clock time on the page and keep it.

Fix it after every session

If you’ll run the same session again, what you wrote right after is the preparation for the next one.

• Move clustered questions into the slides. If three or more people asked, an explanation is missing.
• Drop expected questions that never came up. Put the ones that did in their place.
• Fix the run-of-show with the actual times.
• Keep every response you used in the table. Over sessions, the table becomes this class’s playbook.

We covered a frame for looking back in the KPT retrospective, and how to put the whole session on one page in How to Write an SOP.

Common mistakes

• Starting without a rehearsal. You find out during the session that your 60 minutes is 90.
• Editing materials on the day. The part you changed is where it breaks.
• Forgetting to press record. That’s why it’s in bold on the list.
• Trying to answer questions on the spot. Five prepared answers beat twenty improvised ones.
• Writing nothing down afterward. The next cohort asks the same question at the same place.

Keeping the list and the table next to the live session

What you prepared only gets used if it’s within reach while you’re live.

In fecit, the app we’re building, the class lives as a template, and each session is a task made from that template. What to have ready — slides, equipment — goes in Preparation, the run-of-show goes in steps, and expected questions and failure responses go in Response Rules as “when this happens, I do that.” During the session, keep that task’s Response Rules open.

The questions you added and the order you changed afterward go back into the template through template improvement, where you pick what to keep. The next session’s task starts from there.

Wherever you write it, put down five expected questions and five lines of the response table before your next webinar, and right after it ends, write down the questions that clustered.