Don't forget your weaknesses, but pay more attention to your strengths.

This advice came from a work colleague few days ago. As summarised above, although you should not completely ignore your weaknesses your time is probably better spent concentrating and making your strengths stand out even more. My understanding of the reasoning behind this is if you spend a whole tonne of precious time and effort in building up your weaknesses, it will make you better overall, but you won't stand out. Since you have spent the time working on your weakness (and 'neglecting' your strengths) you will be able to do a good job at most tasks but it'll be harder to do a spectacular job at something.

On the other hand, if you concentrate on your strengths and make them even better you'll be an "expert" at particular tasks and you will be able to stand out in that area. So when someone needs someone to do a job in that area, you will come to mind as the person most suitable to get the job done well.

Of course you can't just not work on your weaknesses at all, for example, there are many 'weaknesses' that you can't just ignore completely - eg communication. If communication is not one of your strengths, I believe you should work on it so you can communicate comfortably and effectively; but there is no need to stress too much that you can't deliver speeches as well as the guy on the stage - after all, public speaking may as well be one of his strengths that he is working hard on improving.

Small invisible 'surprises' that make usability better

Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome...are all web browsers and all have their good and bad bits (except Internet Explorer which only has bad bits). Firefox has the "Awesome Bar"; Safari is faster in comparison; and Chrome is even faster! Everyone has their own browser they prefer which is expected (though if you are still using Internet Explorer - I recommend you change to another browser, you'll never look back!).

I recently saw this invisible "feature" of Chrome that made me smile and marvel at the intricacies of usability design. As a super short summary - in Chrome when you want to close multiple tabs in succession with the mouse, you close the first tab, and the second tab's close button will land right under your mouse pointer ready for you to click again and close. While in Safari (and Firefox too) depending on which tab you close the next tab's close button may not be right under you mouse - thus requiring you to move your mouse to close the next tab. It's only something small, but it shows that Google has thought about it. Another 'plus' is it works so well you generally don't realise unless you are looking specifically for it - a true sign of something that is well designed in my opinion.

Despite the usability in Chrome being evidently thought out very well, I'm still sticking with Firefox for now - I can't live without my multi touch gestures, add-ons and the awesome bar! The super fast Chrome speed is something I'm hoping for but will have to live without for now.

Mini portable notebooks - www.pocketmod.com

A friend introduced me to this awesome discovery she made some time ago - make a simple notebook out of a single sheet of paper. No glue, just some folding and a cut in the paper! With the knowledge of how to fold a "PocketMod" you can quickly create a small notebook to jot your ideas/to-do list down. I've found that even though the area you can write in is technically the same (if not less) as the unfolded piece of paper, because it is now smaller and more notebook-like it is easier to carry around, write in and keep intact. Being able to turn a "scrap piece of paper" into a mini notebook is definitely useful.

Cool procrastination video

Not so much of a musing, but I am sure we all procrastinate. So here's a short video (~4min) about Procrastination for those who are in a procrastinating mood

Recently my friend and I, have for some reason, talked to a lot of people about presentations - and we've been trying to convert them all to use "bullet-point-less" presentations. For those who we've talked to, you've probably already heard this, for those who haven't...welcome to a whole new perspective on presentations!

Late last year, through random blog reading we found a wonderful blog all about presentations: Presentation Zen. There was one post in particular that compared the different presentation styles of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates which I feel is a great introduction and gets straight to the point.

There is no particular style that is "right" but the main concept is to keep your slides simple. Don't overload your audience with information. Don't put a billion bullet points/lines of text into your slide. If you have everything you want to say written on your slides, then the audience doesn't need you to be there - they can just read your slides.

...bullets tend to make our presentations formal and stiff, serve to "dumb down" our points, and lead to audiences being confused...and bored.

Avoiding boring your audience to death with your PowerPoint presentations isn't easy. In my opinion, how you design your slides is very important (and also what you are presenting and how you say it). The approach I've taken is predominately to have pictures/photos and minimal words on the slides. For example, my most recent presentation was pretty much all pictures only. Those slides probably don't mean much at all by themselves, as they were only there to help get my point across. (If you're wondering, they were the slides I used for my Thesis A presentation about Email Addiction in the Workplace)

One of the very first questions people ask is..."Where do I get the pictures from?" Well, there are heaps of different places on the Internet that will give you all the pictures you need - for free! The two that I use most are flickr and stock.xchng. Sometimes I give Google Images a try, however most of the time the images found aren't good in quality. There are many other sites (though some require you to pay), in fact Presentation Zen has a whole list of them!

If I still haven't convinced you to give it a go, have a look at presentations from TED - they are awesome! Or read a few more of the many excellent posts from Presentation Zen.

edit: Found this after writing up the above post - a great video by Garr Reynolds (author of Presentation Zen)  presenting at Google about effective presentations.