Category: personal dev

Continuing on my carnival of presentation posts, I found this excellent list of powerpoint tips in Particletree. Chris has picked up a really cool list of URLs. Ofcourse leading the pack is presentationzen (which has made its way into this blog sometime back). The one which picqued my interest this time and I checked was Seth Godins Ebook – titled ‘Really bad presentations’. It is pretty good.Go check the list yourself at particletree.

If you want to go directly to Godin’s book, click here [pdf].

Steve Pavlina has written a nice piece in his blog about why you should not be worrying what other people think of you. A few quick take-aways from his post:

• At the time during which you are worrying about what other people are thinking of you, they are actually worrying about what you are thinking about them. Henceforth, everyone spends time worrying about what everyone else are thinking about them.
• Just because someone told you not to go through a path because it is wrong, do not just shrug it off. You may encounter failure (and they may point it out to you that they told you before), but that is ok. Now you have learnt your lesson, you brush off the dust and continue.
• Failure is not the opposite of success. They aid in the path to success.
• Self-trust is a far greater possession than anything you might lose along the way.
• Faith in yourself isn’t a result of success. It’s the cause of it.

Read the full post here.

Every one has heard of the saying – ‘To each their own’. I beg to differ. In this age, people have choices. ‘Own’ is singular. People get to choose what they like ‘best’. So I coined my own saying – To each their ‘best’ :).Anyway, that is me trying to play the philosopher. Anyone wonder what secret does ultra-cool Gina Trapani of Lifehacker fame, employ for her daily productivity needs. What hi-fi or lo-fi system does she use ?

Check out her post here.

Very nicely written post which supports my philosophical rambling above. My favourite part of the post is:
Taste-testing is easy. Committing to a tool is more difficult. With the daily onslaught of new and sexy apps out to help you get organized, it’s hard to settle on just one. Don’t get stuck in continual evaluation analysis paralysis, hopping from one solution or software package to another, relentlessly re-working your process for the sake of finding the perfect system. Don’t let Shiny New Thing seduce you. Stick to what works.

Do read through to the end of the post to see her secret weapon.

The two conflicting words that make up the title coincidentally showed up on lifehack.org on the same day. Wow. There are two nice articles on “How and why you should be happy” and “How to stop worrying”. I think these are important things that everyone should know.The first article (read here) talks about why you should spend some time and analyze what makes you happy. And then work towards getting into these situations or achieving such things that will make you happy. One good tip which I strongly agree with, is to surround yourself with happy people. Good read.

The second article (read here) is from Anxiety Culture. Very nicely written piece on why one should not worry. Nice intro.
We’re raised to worry and aren’t considered “grown up” until we perfect the art. Teenagers are told: “you’d better start worrying about your future”. If your worries aren’t at least as frequent as your bowel movements, you’re seen as irresponsible, childish, aimless. That’s a “responsible adult” game rule.

Gives a couple of nice tips. One that seems plausible is to “postpone” worrying. At any given time, if you start worrying about something trivial, write it down on a worry sheet, so you can mull over it later. The author says that, eventually most people forget about it.

Howdy all ! I am back. Hope everyone in India had a safe and fun Diwali. I got back to reading some of the older articles (a week old) today morning, and the first thing that struck me as worthy of posting here was the following article on “How to avoid Monday Morning Blahs” (well fondly called blues). Almost everyone that I know have monday morning blues – all the way from Computer Engineers to CFOs to Executive Directors. The below article points out 5 super duper tips to “possibly” avoid or optimistically put, reduce monday morning blues. The best two points that I liked were :

3. Start something on Friday that you can finish on Monday.
Many times we dread Monday mornings because we know that there are certain projects that we have to tackle for the week. Why not get a headstart on Friday and begin something? That way, you don’t have to overcome the initial procrastination tendencies that are present when you are starting something. You’ve already got momentum started from the week before.

and …

5. Get up earlier than normal on Mondays.
Mondays can be hectic enough without feeling like you have to race everywhere or feel like you’re already behind because you slept in. Get up a half-hour to an hour earlier and take your time. Have a leisurely breakfast. Read the paper. Exercise. If you start out the day racing, it will have a negative effect on the flow of your day.

Read the full article here .

Gen Taguchi over at lifehack.org gives 4 great presentation giving tips (these are not totally just powerpoint hacks). One of his key points is that, several presenters do not get the amount of applause they deserve. And this is not because of a bad presentation, but he/she did not set up the audience correctly for applause.I agree. There is nothing more gratifying to a presenter than a hearty applause (not a half-hearted one). All is well that ends well right ?

Read the tips here.

Sacha, over at diyplanner.com, has a wonderful post on how to read actively. She suggests a template (not really a template but a method of folding a sheet of paper), and using the different sections thus created to help her read. She uses this technique for preparing for her exams, but it can be extended to any book that you want to “actively” read. It does seem like a sound technique.Read the full article here.