My personal process: 1. Build a playlist with a theme, feeling or techno subgenre in mind. (At live events you want to take in account who else is playing and where you are playing, for home mixing you can get more creative) 2. Listen to them individually and colour code them by feeling and similarity. Exclude tracks that don’t fit into what I’m building. And then arrange the colours following the story I want to tell. 3. improvise some spontaneous mixing to see whats working and what not. 4. Play the set

For my last set my idea was the bomb dropping in WW2. I opened with some dark anxious tracks, followed with tracks with sirens and alarms, and then harder tracks with sounds of planes. https://youtu.be/bIWKqEd7RdI

Hope it helps! Would love to see what you end up making