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.
"Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all."
--William Faulkner
Thank you all for being a part of my life. Happy Thanksgiving, and don't forget to give thanks today.
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Well, I've fallen off the wagon again with my Getting Things Done routine. My inbox is up to around 400 messages, I feel a bit "stuck" on a few projects, and that's not good.
Rituals
I love David's GTD methods and philosophy, but I have a recurring issue with drifting away from my good habits. A few months back, I went to one of David's GTD|The Roadmap seminars, and he talked about how we needed to develop new habits for GTD so they'd become automatic, like brushing your teeth. His story went something like this:
Read MoreWhen you're born, you don't know anything about brushing your teeth - you didn't even have teeth. Then, when you had teeth, your parents made you go brush them every day. You may have complained, but they reminded you and you did it every day. Then one day, without realizing it, you did it without being told or asked. You'd developed a new habit!
How often do you need to be reminded to brush your teeth? Probably not very often. As an adult, if you go too long without brushing your teeth, the "scuzz factor" kicks in and the sense of urgency to go brush your teeth increases. And then you brush your teeth and the scuzz factor is gone.
Do you look rumply and crumply when you travel? You don't have to any more. I am happy to say I was invited to be a guest author on Lifehack.org this week, writing about wrinkle-free packing.
As I mention in the article, I've tried every cool method for packing that I could find, but I've finally found one that works. So go over there and read it and, when you are ready to pick up the supplies, here is your shopping list:
I swear by these things, and get comments all the time from my fellow travelers on how unrumpled I look. In fact, this week at the meet-up in London, both Adrian Trenholm and the (blogless) Christopher Morgan commented about how tidy my shirt looked for having traveled from the US the day before (and that was in the evening after a full day).
Why not give it a shot? I started with one, and now I have two for longer trips.
Oh - and wouldn't they make a great gift for that traveler in your life this holiday season?
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Recently, I shared my enthusiasm for the book Beyond Bullet Points, and the presentation method it's helped me learn. Since then, I found out about a Beyond Bullet Points PowerPoint add-in that's made it even easier for me to create high-impact presentations. This add-in was co-developed by Cliff Atkinson, the author of the book, and NetCentrics. I've been a loyal customer of NetCentrics' Getting Things Done Add-In for Outlook for a couple of years now, and they've done a phenomenal job on this add-in, as well.
This product adds a number of toolbar options into PowerPoint, providing easy-to-use guidance that helps you achieve the results described in Cliff's book. One of these options is a "Create New Story" button, which brings up a story creation toolkit that guides you through establishing the main elements of the story you'll be presenting. Following the various screens in the Create New Story process made it very easy to work with. The process felt a bit like creating a screenplay (or so I imagine - I'm not a screenwriter, but I watch a lot of TV). Click the screenshot to get an idea what this new toolkit looks like.
The add-in also puts in some tools to help you manage different color palettes, fills, and other actions that help you create a uniform color scheme throughout your presentation without having to constantly use PowerPoint's (somewhat clunky) color selection dialogs.
One of the key activities in creating a Beyond Bullet Points presentation is use of the slide sorter to create the storyboard, and use of lots of graphics to tell your story. This add-in provides tools to help there, as well. You'll find shortcuts on the button bar to change views, add speaker notes, turn the slide thumbnail view on and off, and a number of other things. Yes, you can do most of that within PowerPoint, but having them right there within easy reach saves some time and hunting.
The bottom line? I am still an enthusiastic advocate of the Beyond Bullet Points method and I urge you to read the book and give this technique a whirl. I also recommend you download the trial version of this add-in to help you create your first Beyond Bullet Points presentation. Once you do, I'm confident you'll find it as impressive as I have.
"Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together." -- Woodrow Wilson My circle of friends is changing in ways I'd never imagined. Earlier this year, Rosa Say found out I was going to London and introduced me to Adrian Trenhom, another friend of hers who lives near London. Though we know her quite well, neither Adrian nor I have ever met Rosa face-to-face (she lives in Hawaii, so you can imagine we'd love to go visit her).
Anyway, Adrian and I got together at St. John's Bread and Wine this summer, and we each brought a friend. I brought along my colleague, Christopher Morgan, as I was traveling around with him that day. Adrian brought James Governor, who happens to be an industry analyst in the industry Chris and I work in. As previously reported, we got along very well, and decided it was something we wanted to repeat.
This week, I visited London again. Chris, James, Adrian, and I all decided to get together at St. John's for a bit more wine and friendly talk. This time, James added a couple more people to the session - Neil Hare-Brown and Babur Mirza, who work for an information security company in London. James assumed (rightly so) that Chris and I would have compatible business interests with Neil and Babur (we met bright and early the next morning for breakfast to discuss this - very cool).
Click on the small version of the photo here to open a Flickr page that has annotations with a few bits of trivia about each of us. And, you can find out what kind of wine we voted "best" for the night.
This meet-up is a great example of how online relationships can turn into terrific off-line relationships.
And it all started with Rosa, my favorite connector.
