How to network at an event without it wearing you out.

You don't need a strategy. You need one sentence: what you're going for. «I'm looking for a technical co-founder», «I want to understand how this gets priced», «I'm here to be seen so someone hires me». One sentence, said out loud before you walk in.

It does two things, and neither of them is motivational. The first is that it filters: with a clear intent, half the possible conversations in the room stop mattering and you can give twice the time to the other half. The second is that it answers the one question everybody asks at an event —«so what brings you here?»— without you having to improvise a speech about your company.

If the event gives you any way to state that intent in advance, state it. It's information that helps everyone else more than it helps you: someone looking for exactly what you offer needs to be able to find you.

Almost all the literature on networking teaches you how to start conversations. That's the easy part. The hard part is that in a crowded room the information that would tell you who to talk to is spread across two hundred heads and can't be seen: who's hiring, who works on the same thing you do, who already knows the person you're interested in.

Without that information, most people do the same thing: they stay with whoever they already knew, or they walk up to whoever is standing alone because it's easier. Both are decisions made out of comfort rather than judgment, and both explain why you leave so many events feeling like you got nothing out of them.

What does work and costs nothing: ask about the third person. «Do you know anyone here working on this?» turns one conversation into two, and an introduction made by someone trusted starts at a level a cold conversation never reaches. It's the same principle behind the triangles lighting up in Constela: three people who already know each other are the shortest path to a fourth.

The next day is where almost everything is lost. Not because people are too lazy to write, but because writing requires remembering, and what an event leaves you —a card, a name in your phone, an accepted connection— doesn't contain what you'd need to remember: what you talked about, what that person was looking for, why it was worth continuing.

The old, good trick is to write one line about the conversation on the back of the card, right there. It works, and it still works. The problem is that nobody does it standing up, with a drink in one hand and a phone in the other.

That's why the record has to happen in the same gesture as the encounter, or it doesn't happen. If connecting requires a separate step —open an app, search a name, send a request— that step gets postponed until it stops making sense. If connecting IS the gesture of scanning someone standing in front of you, then who, where and when are already recorded, without anyone having had to remember a thing.

• Handing out business cards in bulk. Twenty contacts with no context are worth less than three conversations you remember.
• Selling in the first sentence. Nobody at an event is in buying mode; whoever opens by selling becomes the person everyone else walks away from.
• Leaving the follow-up for «when I have time». Context evaporates in days, and with it the only reason that message wouldn't be spam.
• Sticking with the people you already know. It's the most comfortable decision in the room and the only one that guarantees the event was worth nothing to you.

This guide works with a notebook and four paper business cards. If you were also comparing tools, the page on what an event networking app is compares the four methods by what each one leaves behind.