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Tag: presentation

The Getting Things Done workshop at TCUK15

At the TCUK15 conference this year, John Kearney and I gave a workshop covering some techniques for “Getting Things Done” as well as general productivity tips. All of this was aimed at helping our technical communicator peers get all the things done.

Prior to the conference, we sent out some optional homework.

  1. You can start by looking at Karen’s TCUK14 slides. Note the link on the last slide that goes to a bigger reference list on her website.
  2. That brings us to the second homework item: Reading about the science behind GTD.
  3. Think about a project (or the pile of stuff you need to do) that you can bring to the workshop. Having a real-life example to work with is ideal. You can bring it on an electronic device or in a notebook or just a few sheets of paper.
  4. Consider bringing a “GTD tool” with you to the workshop. A notebook and a pen is just fine. If you are bringing an electronic device, try downloading Evernote or OneNote. Both are free and very popular to use for organising tasks. We’ll use them to demonstrate GTD principles, but it’ll be up to you to find what tool or method works best for you. After all, you are the one getting things done! By the way, if you are already using a tool that you rather like, bring it along for a show-and-tell during the workshop.

The workshop slides are on SlideShare, which will please those of you who have asked for them. The rest of this blog post is the raw (and very long) script that we put together for structuring the workshop. It grew from our discussions and planning sessions on Skype, Google Docs, and Twitter DMs! Thank goodness for technology when two speakers live in two different countries! By the way, the script is not verbatim.

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What are you trying to obfuscate?

I found two excellent posts on Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism blog that I had to share. (Unless you’ve already read them, in which case, great!) In one post, he asks the £10,000 question: who benefits most from a tax threshold change? What wonderful real-life examples. Go read the article and see whether you can spot the difference in these charts. Take heed of his point about making the raw data available. The other post discusses the means of presenting data. This builds on lessons learned from Dan Roam’s “The Back of the Napkin” and Stephen Few’s “Now You See It”. A rough summary reads: just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Remember to think about the content. The content. What are you trying to tell the reader? What is appropriate or suitable for the situation? Are you actually trying to confuse them? Really?? Paul Bradshaw updated his article with…

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Igniting Accessibility for Ignite Denmark

Giving a 5-minute Ignite presentation is such an amazing learning experience. The expression mind-blowing is suitable to use. What’s Ignite? It’s an inspiration network. You have 5 minutes and 20 slides to “ignite” the audience with your passion. O’Reilly has the Ignite story for you. I think anyone who carries the label “communicator” ought to try an Ignite presentation at least once in their life. Ignite Denmark manages the Danish sparks. I attended the World Usability Day / Ignite Denmark joint event in November 2010 and got so inspired that I foolishly promised to give a talk on accessibility at the next Ignite Denmark event, which was 1 March 2011. 🙂 This is the result of that promise. My Ignite Presentation I gave the presentation in Danish. The transcripts – in English and in Danish – are further along in this blog post. I posted my slides to SlideShare. Ignite…

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