How I Planned AWS re:Invent 2025 with Notion

Not sponsored. Just me being me - someone who has been obsessed with Notion since the very beginning and somehow manages her entire life, business, community work, and travel inside this one tool.

AWS re:Invent is… a lot.

Huge venues, thousands of sessions, buses and shuttles, walks between hotels that look short on the map but are definitely not short in real life, and the constant fear of missing the session that would have changed your life.

This year I decided to plan re:Invent 2025 properly - not just “hope for the best” and run around Vegas with 12 browser tabs open. And because half of my daily work already lives inside Notion, it made total sense to build my entire conference workflow right there.

Why re:Invent Planning Is Actually Harder Than It Looks

Coming from Vienna means a nine-hour time difference, so your body thinks the Monday 8:30 AM session starts at 17:30. While you are still convincing your brain that it’s not bedtime, your calendar throws you into three overlapping evening events, a chalk talk you absolutely don’t want to miss, and a speaker dinner you forgot you RSVP’d to.

This year I had:

• 4 conflicting Tuesday evening events
• Keynotes overlapping with chalk talks
• Difficult choices on Thursday (yes, I chose Werner - obviously)

And then there’s the information overload: announcements, side events, Expo meetings, community meetups, spontaneous hallway chats… it’s part of the magic, but without some structure, the week can easily turn into a blur.

My Notion re:Invent Planner: The System That Saved My Sanity

I built my own re:Invent planning system in Notion - simple enough to update while half-asleep on a shuttle, flexible enough for schedule chaos, and powerful enough to manage dozens of sessions without losing overview.

A Smart Session Database (the heart of everything)

The core was one clean, structured database containing:

• All sessions I was interested in
• All meetups, community events, and social plans
• All reservations, dinners, and “maybe” activities

A few properties made all the difference:

PT Day & PT Time (24h)
I stopped torturing myself with mental time zone math. My database sorts sessions exactly how they unfold in Las Vegas - not in Vienna. It sounds small, but it’s the reason my brain survived.

Status tracking that works in real life

• Reserved - I had a seat
• Went ☑️ - I actually made it
• Not attended ❌ - reality happened
• Favorite only - will watch the recording
• Interested - “maybe if the universe aligns” sessions

Multiple views for different moments

• A full calendar for the big picture
• A board by day to see my energy load
• A board by status so I could quickly mark what I attended
• A “conflicts” view for sanity checks

Notion Calendar Integration = My Week at a Glance

The calendar view was where everything clicked. Being able to drag sessions, instantly see overlaps, and rearrange priorities felt less like project management and more like choreography.

And since re:Invent schedules always change, having a flexible calendar saved me more than once.

Notion AI: My Co-Pilot Between Venues

Running between Mirage, Caesars Forum, and Venetian is not the moment to manually format tables. So I let Notion AI handle the admin work:

• “Mark all Wednesday morning sessions as Went.”
• “Find any overlaps on Tuesday evening.”
• “Extract the details from this pasted session description.”
• Quick voice notes turned into structured takeaways

The mobile app never slowed me down. It was honestly the perfect companion for the chaos of Vegas.

Sharing Notes and Spreading Knowledge

Because I lead communities and often travel with colleagues, sharing knowledge matters to me. Whenever someone couldn’t attend a session, I added:

• Structured notes
• My rating
• Key takeaways
• “Should-watch-later” hints

This turned my planner into a mini knowledge base for the whole team.

New for 2025: My Fully Automated Daily Video Highlight Reel 🎥✨ 

Also, another thing I’m working on - both for myself and together with clients - is an automated video pipeline.

I came back from re:Invent with around 200 videos and a lot of photos. The next step is straightforward: using the pipeline to categorize and sort everything first, before deciding what to do with it.

Nothing fancy here yet, no polished UI, and no “run it live during the event”. Just applying a system I’m already building to a very real, very messy dataset - and seeing how well it holds up.

The Free Template

I cleaned up my Notion setup and turned it into a free public template that you can duplicate and adapt.

You’ll get:

• The full database structure
• All properties I used (including time zone helpers)
• Example sessions with different status types
• Calendar, board, and table views
• Shortcuts for using Notion AI on the go
• Instructions for customizing the system for your own workflow

The Meta Realization: re:Invent Is Basically a Year-Long Event

I used to think planning for re:Invent in January was overkill. Now I know it’s simply realistic.

The sessions I went to directly shape my 2026 projects - especially everything around agentic AI, automated reasoning, content analysis pipelines, and developer productivity.

The people I met are becoming collaborators. The ideas sparked at 500-level sessions influence my roadmap. The community conversations set the tone for the next year.

So yes… my “re:Invent 2026” page in Notion already exists. 😅

Why Notion Still Works Best for Me

Notion simply fits the way I think and work:

• Flexible data structures
• Multiple views for the same information
• Mobile workflow that actually works
• Collaborative sharing with colleagues and community
• AI that helps instead of getting in the way

I’ve tested many tools, but for complex event planning - especially re:Invent - this setup has been unbeatable for me. And of course I know that it is not perfect yet - I already changed a lot in my new template. So follow along if you want to get the updated templates over time as I test them in different conference scenarios within the next year until re:Invent 2026.

I also relied on great community-built tools during re:Invent that made the experience smoother. One I used before and during the event was the unofficial re:Invent Session Planner by AWS Hero Raphael Manke (reinvent-planner.cloud) - a web planner that helps you browse the full agenda, filter and organize sessions, and build your personalized schedule ahead of reserved seating opening. It’s simple but powerful, letting you create session lists, sync them across devices, and adjust plans as talks get added or updated - something that genuinely changed how I approached my week in Vegas. 

Another excellent resource I came back to after the event is MyRewatch (myrewatch.link), built by AWS Hero Martin Damovsky. With hundreds of recorded talks released during and after re:Invent, it’s easy to lose track of what you wanted to watch. MyRewatch lets you save and organize the sessions you care about - essentially acting as a personalized video library for re:Invent content so you can pick up where you left off without scrolling through thousands of videos.

If you want to level up your conference planning:
Grab the template, make it your own, and let me know what your system looks like. I love seeing how different people prepare for the same giant event.

Linda Mohamed is an AWS & AI Consultant, AWS Hero, and community leader in Austria. She works on applied GenAI, AI video pipelines, and large-scale community projects.