Archive for the 'Individual Solutions' Category

Crafting Effective PowerPoint Presentations: Food for Thought

Posted on December 10th, 2012 · Posted in Individual Solutions

In a previous post I promised you to write about how to craft great PowerPoint presentations. I was planning to give you a list of “do this, do that” tips, but I found myself thinking about some underlying factors that make a slide presentation effective (or not). This turned out much more interesting than just a list of tips, so I’ll share my conclusions with you as food for thought. The conclusions pretty much agree with the way I write presentations for my lectures; I will give you some pointers at the end. Do you really need a “Great PowerPoint.. Read more

How to Write Terrible PowerPoint Presentations

Posted on November 8th, 2012 · Posted in Individual Solutions

Microsoft’s PowerPoint can be a blessing or a curse.  Either way, it is an inseparable part of our business environment (though you do occasionally run into a presenter with the skill and self-assurance to avoid PowerPoint presentations altogether). The trick is to make your PowerPoint presentations into effective tools that you wield to achieve your goals, rather than the converse. I’ve been using PowerPoint for almost two decades, and have seen it used endlessly by others. I still use it today in my public speaking role, where it’s imperative that it do good. And it never ceases to amaze me.. Read more

Four things I want YOU to do to avert data disasters

Posted on October 26th, 2012 · Posted in Individual Solutions

It’s simple: if you read my blog, that makes you my friend. And friends don’t let friends put themselves in harm’s way. I keep running into this situation: a friend gloomily tells me  about how he or she had come to grievous harm when their hard disk crashed, or when a virus infected their machine, or when their account got hacked. So I ask: you made a backup, right?!  But no, they hadn’t. They behaved irresponsibly, and they paid the price. Then I advise them how to take preventive measures so they’ll do better next time, but I beat myself.. Read more

Handling Obsolescence of Knowledge in Information Work

Posted on October 18th, 2012 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Individual Solutions

We need food to survive. Old food can do us harm. Therefore, we have a range of defense mechanisms – from our noses and taste buds to mandatory “best use before” dates on food packages – to detect and eliminate obsolete food. We need information to survive in today’s workplace. Old information can do us harm. Where are the defense mechanisms to detect and eliminate obsolete knowledge? Help! We’re drowning in old information! Everybody complains about drowning in information overload, be it incoming email overload, social media addiction, too many RSS feeds, and so on. We also complain about useless.. Read more

How You Can Stop the Abuse of Reply to All

Posted on August 14th, 2012 · Posted in Individual Solutions, Organizational Solutions

Reply to All: probably the most hated feature of Email. How do I know? Because whenever I work with clients to reduce Email Overload, one request pops up right at the beginning: Can we put a stop to the abuse of Reply All? Yes, you can. But before I talk about solutions, let’s consider why anyone would misuse Reply to All in the first place, if they hate it so? Part of the problem, and the reason the feature is retained, is that it is really about enabling two very different functions: Conversation: When communicating within  a small team, it.. Read more

The early bird and information overload

Posted on June 5th, 2012 · Posted in Individual Solutions

Over the years I noticed a solution that some diligent people apply to get over info overload and interruptions: they start their workday (at home or even in the office) an hour or more before the usual “Nine to Five”. Showing up at the office at 6 or 7 AM gives them an hour or two of total quiet, when they can concentrate on their work. In a sense they sacrifice sleep time to get onto a time machine and jump to that gentler age when people actually worked, without the rude interruptions of our Blackberry era. It’s a satisfying.. Read more

Look in the mirror

Posted on March 6th, 2012 · Posted in Individual Solutions

Sometimes what it takes is to look at oneself in a figurative mirror. People hear me lecture about Information Overload and the absurd behaviors it makes us adopt, and they light up with recognition; many come to me afterward to share excitedly how they saw their own life in my descriptions. Which is fine and good, but I like to think that at least some of them go on to change their actions and attain a better life as a side benefit of having had this mirror put in front of them. I first saw this effect long ago when.. Read more

We’ll talk!

Posted on February 9th, 2012 · Posted in Individual Solutions

An all too common pattern of one to one communication these days involves a lengthy ping pong of email messages going back and forth. One piece of advice I often give is “after a few times, just pick up the phone!” Well, I realized that one friend I have, a college faculty member, is being more proactive than that. This guy, a well-connected Digital Native, ends many of his one to one mails with “We’ll talk”, or “Talk to me <phone number>”, or “Set 30 minutes with <his secretary>”. What this smart fellow is doing, is to send across briefly.. Read more

All alone in the info-flood

Posted on January 6th, 2012 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Individual Solutions

Although practically every organization is full of knowledge workers groaning under a deluge of email, it’s interesting to note that in many of them I run into a small minority of people who have things under control. I discover them on occasion when I explain the various solutions I can bring in, and someone says “Oh, but I already handle this by…” or “I never do that, I always…” The things they do vary; my favorite are the rare heroes who tell me they turn off all electronic devices after work hours, but there are many variations. Basically these people.. Read more

How a real Pro manages Email

Posted on November 25th, 2011 · Posted in Individual Solutions

Email overload tends to go up the more senior you get; executive level managers can easily get a few hundred incoming work-related messages a day. This is so commonplace that they don’t even stop to complain about it; they either cope with the crushing stress or they delegate their Inbox processing to an assistant. I’ve known one glaring exception, however. I knew one senior manager, a VP  of a hi-tech Fortune 500, who had a perennially near-empty inbox, and was receiving a paltry few dozen emails a day. I inquired as to how he got to this enviable state, and.. Read more