Ever since Donaldson showed that every symplectic 4-manifold admits a Lefschetz pencil and Giroux proved that every contact 3-manifold admits an adapted open book decomposition, at the turn of the century, Lefschetz fibrations and open books have been used fruitfully to obtain interesting results about the topology of symplectic fillings of contact 3-manifolds. In this talk, I will present my contribution to the subject at hand based on joint work with several coauthors during the past 20 years.