Genuine Curiosity

Author Dwayne Melancon is always on the lookout for new things to learn. An ecclectic collection of postings on personal productivity, travel, good books, gadgets, leadership & management, and many other things.

 

A few for Friday

After a crazy week, I have a few assorted tidbits to share with you:

The new edition of Beyond Bullet Points just plain rocks.

Last week, I posted an item about Cliff Atkinson's book, Beyond Bullet Points, over on Joyful Jubilant Learning - this is a book that totally changed how I do presentations, and I have long recommended it to others.

Shortly after posting the item, I got a note from Cliff telling me that there was a new an improved edition of the book. I updated the links in all my posts about the book and ordered a copy of the new one for myself. It showed up earlier this week and I started reading it.

Let me tell you - Cliff has raised his own bar on this one. There is more analysis of what's effective and ineffective in presentations, more about why his techniques work, much more prescriptive guidance on creating presentations, and -- very handy -- a CD with tools and examples.

Free ebook on stopping procrastination

The folks at "Fruitful Time" are offering a free ebook called "Stop Procrastination Now," along with a bundled evaluation copy of their Fruitful Time software. Fruitful time is a personal task management system that was recently released.

I played around with their software and it is pretty good - I don't use it because of my unnatural dependence on Outlook, and it doesn't currently integrate with Outlook. However, if you don't have that requirement, their product could be a good fit for you.

And, in any case, the ebook is worth the read.

SameCell is ready for prime time

Some time back, I wrote about a product called "SameCell" that runs on your cell phone or PDA and alerts you when you are near someone else in your SameCell "friends list." I've been using it since then, and I like it. There are quite a few folks on my list that travel a lot, and we have discovered we were in the same airport a few times and gotten together for a drink during a layover.

They are now out of Beta test mode and in full production, with more phone platforms being supported (including Blackberry, the iPhone and iPod Touch), and some cool integrations with FaceBook. Oh - and it's still free.

Related items

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Bless this mess?

In its contest (going on through February 25) the company "MyFax" wants to know: How messy is your office?

If it's messy enough, you could walk away with $10,000.

To enter, all you have to do is take a photo or video of the glorious mess that is your workspace and upload it to their contest site by noon EST on February 25, 2008. A hand-picked team of organizationally-challenged experts will select the finalists, and then open it up to the public to select the winner from among the finalists. Results will be announced Monday, March 5, 2008.

The top prize is $10,000, so this could be your chance to make some serious bucks here. MyFax will also be awarding additional prizes totaling $5,000 to the other finalists.

After you've submitted your picture or video and want to get things organized, Ariane Benefit's got a guide to help you - I reviewed it a few weeks ago - you can check out the review ("Whip your office into shape") here, as well as find out how to order your copy.

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More Power to the Point

Tinyslides_1 I do a lot of presentations in my line of work, and am always looking for ways to improve. A while back, I read the book "Beyond Bullet Points," by Cliff Atkinson, which provides a process that helps you dramatically increase the impact of your presentations. As the name implies, you get away from using bullet points in PowerPoint and use a storytelling approach to convey your points.

While I read the book a long time ago, I finally bit the bullet (so to speak) and decided to deliver my first presentation using this technique a couple of weeks ago in Las Vegas. I was nervous about trying this totally different approach, as I was presenting to a bunch of internal auditors at a conference, and there was considerably less hard data on my slides than usual.

I'm happy to say the presentation went quite well, and I had the chance to tighten up the story for another rendition of the presentation this week in Toronto.

Why am I such a big fan of this approach? As the book says, if your slides say everything you want to cover then why do they need you to show up? Also, the message becomes more memorable - and much more poignant - if you display mastery of your topic by adding personal stories and interpretation to the message.

Beyond Bullet Points provides a very straight-forward approach to organizing and expanding your presentation content using a
screenplay approach. You approach your presentation like you are writing a script, and you create levels of detail to fill 5, 15, 30, and 60 minutes. This is great because it gives you an effective way to tailor your presentation to fit the time allotted without feeling rushed and, most importantly, without leaving out major points.

Once you have your script created, you use a then storyboard process to build effective visuals to support your story. Since there is so much imagery involved, you may find yourself struggling to find good images to use on your slides. I used a combination of photos I took, a few I found on Google, and some that I found in a photo clip art collection from Hemera that I bought on Amazon.

The book also provides links to a web site where you can download free templates (in Word and Excel) to help you build your script, and a storyboard slide template for PowerPoint. These templates make it very easy to organize your thoughts and get into this new presentation process.

If you create and deliver presentations with any sort of frequency, I highly recommend you try the Beyond Bullet Points approach.

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You’ll flip...

Today, I was watching a software demo and saw a cool thing. The guy was demonstrating how various people would interact with his company's software, and he brought up a 3D cube on the screen with a different user's desktop and browser on each side of the cube! It was awesome, so I asked him how he did it right after the demo.

He was using a utility called "DeskSpace" to make it happen. I downloaded a trial copy and recorded a short demo video of DeskSpace so you can see how it works, below (note that the video is choppy, but that is a symptom of the refresh rate on the capture - in real life, this is very smooth and "slick" in appearance).

This is a Windows app and seems to be fairly stable (I'm running it on Vista, but it also works on XP). Each desktop looks like a different system, since the status bar for an app only appears on the desktop where that app is running. This doesn't change the performance of your system since you're really just running the apps inside one instance of an OS, but it does make it easy to create an uncluttered collection of desktops.

For example, I experimented with Outlook on one desktop and a couple of browser sessions, each on a different side of the cube. It was cool to be able to switch around. I can see this being handy if you have a "context switching" kind of job - such as one pane for a CRM, one pane for email, one pane for web research, etc.

There is a free trial if you want to dabble, and it's $20 to buy. I'm still demo-ing for now.

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[Review]: Discovering Your Inner Samurai

I'm privileged to be a part of the Virtual Book Tour for Dr. Susan L. Reid's book, "Discovering Your Inner Samurai: The Entrepreneurial Woman's Journey to Business Success1." This book is an interesting business book in that it grapples with a tremendous array of topics, all designed to help women conquer the trepidation, disillusionment, and other obstacles that must be overcome by a successful woman entrepreneur (referred to as a "Pren-Her" by Dr. Reid).

Now, a lot of the obstacles discussed in this book are the sorts of things that entrepreneurs of any gender can encounter, so there is tremendous advice here for any aspiring entrepreneur - not just Pren-Hers. However, Dr. Reid weaves in some powerful advice tailored to the "styles" and needs of women, exploring differences in bonding and communication styles, and the advantages of women's ability (and willingness) to "go deeper" into the emotional realm of business. For example, there is a chapter on "Womaning - Woman As A Verb" that I really enjoyed - it's a great exploration of how women build relationships. For such a short section in the book, it sure helped expand my perspective.

Keeping it real

Like most books that really "connect" with me, this book is full of wonderful stories of real life experiences. Dr. Reid talks a lot about her own journey through business and life (don't miss the early chapter describing her spiritual awakening). It's through these stories that she teaches us to connect with our "Inner Samurai" -- the voice in our heads that gives good advice and helps you remain centered in the heat of battle. She also teaches us to be more aware of this good voice, since it can easily be drowned out by our less helpful voices.

"Why do we think our thoughts are the truth? Because we form attachments to our thoughts. Instead of listening to our Inner Samurai, we form attachments to what the voice inside our head is telling us. When that happens, we're lost -- lost to focusing on past failures or future dividends instead of present joys. Lost to what really matters in life. We dwell within the domain of ego believing it to be real."
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