Get your tickets organised for family and friends. What about car parking at training? What's the media message to members and supporters? And how best to handle well wishers, including over-enthusiastic club board directors.
The Swans and the Bulldogs have this and much more to digest over the next couple of days as they prepare for the showcase day on the AFL calendar.
"There will probably be a bit more media and the parade. We will enjoy that and embrace it and come out Saturday and, hopefully, start the game the way we did [against the Cats]," Swans defender Jeremy Laidler said.
As former Hawthorn hardnut Brad Sewell says of this busy period early in the week: "You can't win it [premiership], you can't lose it but the way the club sets up the week early days is important."
And Sewell should know, for he and the Hawks emerged victorious in 2008 and 2013, while also playing off for the flag in 2012.
"A lot of the administrative staff are setting up if you win or lose during the prelim week," he said.
This includes a contingency plan if the preliminary final is lost, and Mad Monday beckons.
"If you get done [lose], it's in terms of events or venues where you are going, ensuring everyone has transportation, mini-buses, all those type of things just to ensure there are no misdemeanours," Sewell said.
"Then, of course, if you win, there's ticketing, the grand-final parade, there are parking issues throughout the week at the club for training. Family, friends – everyone wants a piece of you.
"Particularly for a young team and a young club, it is important to ensure protocols and structures are put in place to ensure guys can switch off and relax. They might have to turn their phone off. The media – TV, print, radio – through the week, whilst there is usually 18 teams, there is only two in that last week. All of that needs to be critically managed as well."
Team bosses will stress the need to make the most exciting week of the season as normal as possible, and that can largely be achieved through keeping regular recovery, training and review sessions – but life outside of the team "bubble" is a different story.
Experience
Former Essendon assistant coach Robert Shaw, who was involved in the 2000 premiership and the losing grand final a year later, said several Swans would have the advantage of having been in this situation before.
"Players and coaches must have an normal week – apart from the parade and the Brownlow Medal. Therefore, the distractions must be the absolute minimum. Recover, train, review, select and analyse as per a normal week," he said, adding the post-game meeting after the preliminary final was "very important".
He said this was an "intimate meeting" involving players, coaches and key administrators, where they could "spend quiet time together in reflection and set the scene for the week to come".
The Cats, Swans, Bulldogs and Giants had all been planning for this moment for several weeks. The Cats of 2007 had even begun their planning two months earlier, stressing the need for grand-final week to be business as usual. For that young and inexperienced group, this meant opting to not follow the customary protocol of having at least half-a-dozen players available for interview at once in an open media day at the start of the week.
Three-time Cats premiership defender Matthew Scarlett says in his autobiography of that year that there had been a "freedom about grand final week that I hadn't expected".
"The players were determined to enjoy the moment and, as strange as it may seem, training felt like just any other week," he said.
Ahead of the 1995 grand final, dual Carlton premiership defender Steve Silvagni remembers a team dinner with players, committee and coaching staff being an important part of the lead up, and the Blues following an "unwritten rule" not to wear sunglasses at the parade, noting some Geelong players had and looked "fairly comfortable" with themselves – ammunition the Blues would use.
Pats enough
Internally, the pats on the back come thick and fast, and Shaw also had a message for well-meaning club directors.
"Keep inexperienced board members away. They do get very excited. Some clubs in the past like Essendon have had premiership heroes on the board. Alec Epis, Don McKenzie can then be great allies," he said.
Sewell remembers it as being a week when long-lost friends had a propensity to suddenly make contact - all in the hope of pocketing a free ticket.
"You might have friends you haven't heard from in 10 years – just throwing it out there for a 'Hail Mary', hoping you might have a spare one. It happens unashamedly – it's hilarious," Sewell said.
Help line
In terms of the inner-sanctum, anyone who has tasted the ultimate success, or at least featured in a grand final, will almost certainly be asked for advice. In '08, that was why the Hawks elevated Stuart Dew, a former Port Adelaide premiership player, into the leadership group late in the year. And all Hawks' supporters remember what Dew did on that last Saturday of September.
"While he wasn't in the leadership for that year, but we bought him in basically for the last eight weeks, six weeks, because he had been through finals and grand finals at Port Adelaide," Sewell said.
"We leaned on him quite a bit in terms of what to expect, how to handle such things. We were a really young club, young team, young leadership group – one of the greatest take aways from his involvement at the time was you still have to enjoy it.
"You need to go out in the parade and really enjoy it, soak it up, have a look at the crowd, try and pick your friends out standing in the streets, wave, because if you are so up tight and tense, you still have to have a bit of fun.
"It's not hard to imagine teams or clubs going too far down the other way and being so focused and just playing the game over in your head so many times that by the time you get there you just heap depression on yourself."
For the players, it's, as Sewell says, about keeping things fun. For those off-field, Shaw has this directive.
"Don't invent anything you haven't done before. The event takes care of itself. Inexperience can be costly because people think they have to do something extraordinary. Leave the extraordinary to the players," he said.
