Throwing Fish!

This is my (mega-ninja) friend Merlin. We went to college together. We were both goof-offs to some extent (but he was a much smarter goof-off). We'll get back to him in a moment.

During teacher planning week they showed us a motivational video about these guys at a big international fish market in a city who made their job fun by really performing for their customers and making a big show of throwing the fish and just making their "boring" job a ton of fun. It was motivating and as you watched you wanted to be one of those guys.

Then I had to sit through four (!) two-hour (!) slide-show presentations that turned my brains into tapioca pudding. I've mentioned this problem in this blog previously.

Which brings us back to Merlin. He recently gave a slide-show presentation at the Googleplex on how to deal with your email called "Inbox Zero." I've mentioned and linked to these before. Now he has written a post about how he made this presentations so darn good. Please read it if you or anyone you know needs to do a presentation and feels the need to use a slide-show (Powerpoint, etc).

Most important rule: 10-20-30. No more than ten slides. No more than twenty minutes. No font smaller than 30pt. Now go and throw some fish!

Powerpoint is Evil!

Or whatever slideshow program. I had to sit through two two-hour "meetings" today. The first had slides that were dense with text. Bad. I'm not reading all that. The second one handed out photocopies of the slides, then the presentors proceeded to read the slides to us! Since I'm a grown up and can read, I left this "meeting" early. To be fair, these people are good at their jobs and their job is not "professional presenter," but I hope this is something we can all work on.

For a good example of how to use slides during a talk, checkout the Inbox Zero talk Merlin Mann gave at Google. It can be found on his 43folders.com site (link on my blogroll). It's also an excellent method of dealing with the madness of email. Remember, the video is long but you only need to watch the first thrirty minutes.

The Shared Items To the Right...

Definitely check out Merlin's In-Box Zero video if you have the time. It runs for an hour, but you only need to watch the first thirty minutes. Unless you work for Google, the Q&A session is not going to be helpful. The Education Week links unfortunately require you to register to read them, so I'll only link to them occasionally--but they're worth checking out.

Deal with Yor E-Mail

Scott Rosenberg has some book reviews and links in this Salon article. I agree with him on the power of Gmail. Who needs a bunch of folders when you can archive everything and search it? And it makes it easy to keep my Inbox to zero, but still hang on to stuff I want to review. And I can access it anywhere. And it's free.

I love the internet.

Step Away From the Keyboard

Sorry about the earlier email rant post. My school email inbox was killing me. I counted yesterday and got over forty emails and only nine were actually for me personally. So please stop and think before you email. People are busy and if you need a stamp or a carpet cleaner or a new dentist or some green paper, ask around. Then email a few people. Then maybe email your grade level. But do you really need to email the entire building? It's especially odd at my school. I teach at an elementary school with around 1800 students, so it's easy for email to turn into white noise.

What's funny is that many people complain about the emails, but I'm not sure they remember that when they're at their laptops. It's an extra layer of busy-work that teachers don't really need.

I've gotten away from it by turning off my email alarm and have decided only to check it in the morning, at lunch, and before I leave. If there's anything that needs to be dealt with in-between those times, they'll come get me. Just like they did before email. I'm busy teaching, thanks.

Merlin's Email Article

Merlin over at 43folders wrote a great article about cleaning up email. link. Most of the other sites on the blogroll have something as well. As for my school email, I simply use three folders: Next Actions (things I need to do or respond to), Reference (links or emails I may need to refer to--as few as possible), and Waiting For (usually copies of email requests I've made and am waiting on a response from).

The other best thing you can do is forward reference stuff, fun forwarded emails from friends or colleagues, or anything else you'd like to keep into a big searchable email account like gmail (Google's email) or Yahoo mail. That way you're not tying up precious school server space and you're keeping your work email light and clean (like a ninja!) so you don't have it clogging up and causing stress.

Also, if you get a forwarded email you'd like to pass on, forward it to your personal email, then forward it on from there (and mostly to other friends' personal emails). Then you won't see rants like the one earlier and everyone at work will be happier.

I Don't Care--email rant

I don't care who you recommend to clean my carpets, or if you need a stamp, or if you lost your cell phone, or if you found some plastic earrings on the playground. I especially don't care if you found the funniest or most interesting forwarded email in the world. DO NOT EMAIL that stuff. Email your friends. Email your grade level. Email the tech person to put it on the school website. Email the weekly announcements messenger--that's what it's for. Don't fill up my box with that stuff. I've got stuff to do.

More on email soon.