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.
I just found out that there is a free teleseminar coming up on July 9th for Dan Roam's book, The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. Joining Dan on the call will be Seth Godin, Anil Dash and Rich Sloan so it will be very good, I'm sure.
If you recall, I reviewed The Back of the Napkin last week and I think it's awesome (that's Dan over there on the left).
You can register for the free seminar or find out more at Dan's blog.
Read MoreThe other day, I was on a conference call with Cliff Atkinson (author of Beyond Bullet Points) who was training a group of folks on How to Create Your Graphics LIVE on a Tablet PC, Whiteboard or Piece of Paper (one of his weekly e-Lessons). One of the tips he gave us to get better at ad-hoc presentations was to read Dan Roam's book, The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures.
Seth Godin's review (see the diagram at right , from the dust jacket of the book) says it all. This is a very interesting book, and I've already applied some of the concepts from the book to improve a couple of whiteboarding sessions at the office.
The gist of it is to use drawings instead of dry slides or wordy diatribes to explain your ideas. Instead, engage the audience by creating simple diagrams to illustrate your points. The big problem I have: coming up with good graphics to illustrate my point. I am finding that a) practice helps, and b) if I am planning to do a talk, part of that planning should include brainstorming how I can tell the story better with pictures, and deciding which pictures to use.
The book is full of examples, along with techniques to help you come up with visual methods to present various topics and problems in a compelling way. For example, you'll find chapters on:
And even if you don't choose to do everything in pictures, you'll find techniques that will help you structure and simplify your message for greater effectiveness.
This book isn't just for people who do presentations all the time. I bet you'll find that the skills you'll develop by studying and applying the approach in this book will dramatically increase your effectiveness in meetings, and improve your ability to "sell" your ideas to others.
Read MoreIf you're looking for a straightforward way to track your to-do's, organize projects, and keep yourself on track, you might find what you need with "Smart To-Do List." This Windows-based application helps you create projects, track progress, rate task importance, and filter your tasks.
The software is intended to be "GTD Friendly" so you can manage projects, priorities, and contexts all from within the tool. For example, you can tag tasks @Office if they need to be peformed at your office, and you can filter based on these tasks. Pretty neat approach.
The product does a nice job of segmenting tasks by projects, as well, and I found it very easy to change projects or contexts and quickly refocus on what I should be doing.
For me, the only drawback is that all of my task information "lives" in Outlook, and there is no automatic synchronization. This product does offer import/export capabilities, but they are manual as this is really a standalone application.
I am experimenting with using To-Do List as the UI for a couple of projects to see how a blended approach works. Basically, I put a "pointer" in my tasks list in Outlook for a project, which reminds me that the project 'lives' in Smart To-Do List so I can manage it from there.
I've been trading emails with the folks at the company, and they are really passionate about this product and committed to ongoing enhancement of the product so I'm optimistic the product will be even better in the future..
The publisher provides a free, 30-day trial so you can download Smart To-Do List figure out if this is a tool you want to adopt. By the way - if you decide to evaluate it, be sure and read the help file - while you can start using the product immediately without it, the Help system introduces some advanced features that are not obvious from looking at the UI.
Read More[Note: This post previously announced this seminar - now it tells you how to access the archive]
This morning, I saw an online seminar by Cliff Atkinson (author of Beyond Bullet Points) called: Creating a 15-Minute Presentation in 1-Hour. It is a very useful walk-through of the process from start-to-finish, and illustrates the concepts from Cliff's book very effectively.
You can access the content by clicking the link above (may require a free registration at Microsoft Office Online).
Take advantage of this Freebie if you have any interest in improving your presentation creation skillz.
Cliff's seminars never disappoint - I'm a member of his Beyond Bullet Points (BBP) community, and it is worth the price of admission - he does weekly e-Lessons on various topics, including soliciting topics from volunteers in the BBP community. He actually creates presentations with the volunteers, based on their topic - cool stuff.
Related items
Read MoreLast month, I wrote about Eluma 2.0 (Eluma: Browse, organize, and share) which is a pretty cool tool for organizing, sharing, and tracking web-based information (web sites, RSS, web clippings, etc.) on Windows XP and Windows Vista. At the time of my original review, Eluma was in private beta.
Good news: Eluma has unleashed the hounds, and Eluma 2.0 is now in public beta. You can find out more about Eluma and download the beta at their web site. They also have a useful blog that discusses how to cope with information overload (using Eluma, of course).
Here is their video fly-by: