My laptop messenger bag is basically my mobile office. I take it with me whenever I leave the house for anything more than a trip to the grocery store. The contents of that bag let me quickly get to work anywhere I am, any time I want - and that gives me a lot of personal and professional flexibility.

Reflected in the bag, though, are several aspects of my frugal sensibilities. Most of the items in the bag, in fact, cost me only pennies. My biggest strategy is to look for useful freebies - things that are extremely inexpensive or free replacements for items I might otherwise pay for because they clearly fill a use.

Several readers have asked for a tour of the bag, so here goes. I hope you find some tips and tactics that are useful.

The Foundation - In My Pockets

The four most important items - the ones I find myself turning to several times a day - reside in my pockets, not in my messenger bag. These essentially boil down to four items.

Keys I keep my keychain simple - just the key/car opener for each of the two vehicles we own, the key to my own house, and the key to my parents’ house. I have several other important keys, but I keep them locked away at home to reduce pocket bulk.

Wallet It’s where I store receipts and keep my drivers’ license and a small number of other cards. I’ve discussed in detail how to organize the items in your wallet, and I still stick by those principles.

Swiss Army Knife I received this as a Christmas gift a few years ago, and it serves me well - I specifically carry the Spartan model, which is minimal in size but also minimal in tools. It does include the three things I use most often - the corkscrew, a basic blade, and a bottle opener. I used to carry a Leatherman Wave, but it was right on the fine line of being too bulky and it didn’t include a corkscrew, which I consider to be practically essential for a pocket tool like this. Having used both extensively over the last decade, I’ve realized the tool I would actually like to have is the Leatherman Flair, which is basically a “middle” alternative between the two.

iPod Touch Prior to receiving this as a gift, I kept a notepad and a pen in my pocket, as well as a voice recorder. This device has replaced both, as I can jot down most quick notes and do quick voice recordings with it. It also takes up less space in the pocket.

No cell phone? Honestly, I don’t carry one in my pocket at all times. I usually find it to be a digital leash, enabling people to contact me and interrupt me at the very time I want to escape a little bit.

The Bag Itself

That’s my messenger bag, in it’s typical place by the door of my office so I can grab it whenever I’m ready to go somewhere.

The bag itself is a Timbuk2 Laptop Messenger bag made from hemp. I’ve removed the shoulder strap since I virtually never used it and it always seemed to be in the way - I prefer to carry it by the handle.

The bag sports a Google logo because the bag was a giveaway item - I didn’t buy it. Likely, I would have just used my old college-era backpack until it fell apart, but since this bag was free, I’m quite happy to use it.

The Contents of the Bag

So what’s in the bag? I pulled everything out of the bag for the picture above. Here’s what’s inside, starting in the upper left and proceeding downward.

Laptop AC adapter This item’s in the upper left and is pretty self-explanatory.

The “frugal laptop” I discussed this in the past. This is a rather old laptop that I recently refurbished and installed Linux on. It works perfectly on the road, as the big things I want to do when traveling are accessing the web, answering email, and a bit of light writing. I don’t do heavy duty tasks when traveling, so an older laptop with Linux on it is perfect for my needs. Again, this is an item that’s in there because it’s a great value - reusing an old piece of equipment and finding a great new use for it is a great frugal tactic.

A USB “multi-card” reader This little device lets me read memory cards of all kinds, allowing me to easily transfer files.

Pens I keep a healthy collection of pens in my bag so that I can jot down notes at any time and I don’t have to worry about one failing.

Wireless mouse This is probably the least-used item in my bag. I keep it in there because it’s useful to have when others are using my laptop for some purpose - I prefer the touch pad, but some people hate it. This one’s another freebie, actually.

Small notebook Sometimes it’s just not convenient to use the laptop for note-taking or for jotting down very quick notes or for giving people notes of some kind. In those events, I bust out a small notebook like this one. I used to use a full-size pad, but I found this medium-sized one to be more convenient and appropriate for my use (plus they were on sale at a huge discount at a local store a while back - literally pennies each).

Nintendo DS / earphones / baggie with games If I’m caught in a situation with fifteen minutes or less of downtime, I’ll usually get out my DS and play a game of some sort. It’s also a surprisingly effective way to connect with some people.

Reading materials The rest of my bag is filled with reading materials. An allotment of recent magazines (WIRED, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Bon Appetit, The Economist, Business Week, and Consumer Reports are all visible) and two books (at this moment, Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein and if on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino) can usually be found - sometimes, there will be newspapers and other documents in there, too.

Digital camera I also include my digital camera in the bag, so I can take pictures. It’s not in the image above, though … because I’m using it to take the picture.

One thing I should be carrying, but am not in this picture, is business cards. I usually keep a handful of Simple Dollar-related cards in the bag, but I happened to be out of them when the picture was taken.

Two Useful Rules of Thumb
So, what’s useful to note here?

A travel bag doesn’t need to be expensive In the pictures above, most of the pens, the wireless mouse, all of the software on the laptop, and the bag itself were free. The magazines, the spiral notebook, and the paperbacks were obtained for pennies. The laptop itself is reused. The DS, the iPod Touch, the knife, and most of the DS games were given to me as gifts. To put it simply, the bag full of essential items that I carry with me wasn’t a big cash outlay - many of the items were either free (or nearly so) or gifts.

Less is more I know many people with bags far, far more overstuffed than mine. Once upon a time, my bag included quite a bit more than this, too. I realized several things, though. First, the more stuff you carry in the bag, the harder it is to find the item you want when you want it. Second, if you’ve got it stuffed to the rims, it’s even more devastating if you lose the bag. Third, an overstuffed bag is much heavier. Finally, an overfilled bag creates a really terrible impression of you on others.

Focus on what you actually need to do On the road, I do several things. I do some light research. I do some writing. I go to meetings where I take notes. I answer email. I wait. In reality, that’s about it. So I focus on the materials that make these tasks easier. Other items are unnecessary.

Good luck.

The survey results are starting to appear from the survey many of you took a few weeks ago (thanks again for doing this). I found three things really interesting.

70% of the readership is between 18 and 39. Which basically means… most of you are my age or close to it. Sometimes, I’m concerned that I focus too much on relating experiences that are highly tied to my age (early-to-middle career growth, marriage, having children, very comfortable with technology), but the demographics seem to match this very well.

73% of the readership earns $50K a year or more. I found this to be very interesting. If you’re earning $50K per year, your value per hour of work is at a minimum $25 per hour. Yet I often get the impression that many of my readers (meaning quite a few people earning that much) really like the hardcore frugality stuff - stuff that actually earns less than $10 per hour, for example. That’s a really interesting mix. What does it mean? I’m not sure yet.

My audience is almost 60% female. Three out of five readers are women. Again, I’m left to think about exactly why this is. One of my friends thinks it is because of my writing “tone.”

Anyway, interesting stuff. Some of the data isn’t loaded into the survey results (as of this writing), but there’s still plenty of interesting stuff to look at.

The Three Most Influential Lessons My Parents Taught Me Excellent, excellent stuff. It’s very interesting to look at how people are influenced by their parents in ways that are often hard to imagine when you’re younger. (@ frugal dad)

I Cashed Out My SIMPLE IRA An unexpected personal finance decision. Faith. Emergencies. It all ties together here. Did he make the right move? I honestly don’t know. (@ gather little by little)

Should I Take a Job That Pays Less Than Unemployment? Lots of interesting points on both sides of the question. My feeling? If the job has clear career benefits, take it - otherwise, wait. (@ wisebread)

Ratings of Big Retailers From my perspective, Costco and Sam’s Club are pretty similar to each other as a shopping experience. Saying that, I prefer to shop at warehouse clubs - there’s more space to move around and fewer people in your way. (@ free money finance)

Over the next several months, I’m giving several presentations and speeches on my story and what I learned about personal finance along the way. Some of these engagements will be paid ones, thus this may be the beginning of a new revenue stream in my life.

As with anything new in my life, I’m filling some of my spare hours learning more about public speaking, particularly since this may begin to become a source of income. My first step was to simply ask some of my friends for suggestions, focusing on the small handful that I know have at least some positive public speaking experience.

I received two book suggestions in return - this book and the already-reviewed Presentation Zen.

You’ve Got to Be Believed to Be Heard by Bert Decker is a thorough guide to public speaking, focusing somewhat on extemporaneous speaking (when you don’t have time to prepare much in advance, like off-the-cuff speeches and question-and-answer questions). It addresses most of the major issues that people have with public speaking: overcoming stage fright, organizing your ideas, making your energy and passion come across in your voice, mastering your mannerisms, using eye contact, using humor, and so on, including plenty of exercises to improve these specific aspects of your speaking.

Is this material actually compelling and useful to prospective public speakers? Or could you just get the same thing from a Toastmasters meeting or two? Let’s dig in.

The Emotional Connection
First of all, we are all public speakers. Every time we speak to someone else, we’re practicing public speaking on some level. Some people are good at this - they come across as interesting and energetic and you want to get to know them more. Some people aren’t.

Decker’s key argument throughout the book is that successful speakers make an emotional connection with their audience. A great example of this comes from comparing Bill Walsh to John Madden. Both were very successful football coaches who tried their hand at broadcasting and speaking. Obviously, Walsh failed and Madden succeeded, but why? Although Walsh was more accomplished and more photogenic, he wasn’t able to connect with audiences that well - he rarely smiled and rarely put any enthusiasm or life into what he was saying, things that Madden was able to succeed with. You don’t need to be photogenic to succeed - look at Madden or Dick Vitale! They succeed because they’re clearly passionate and make an emotional connection with the people in the room. More Dick Vitale and less Dan Rather, in other words. More Steve Jobs and less Mark McGwire. More talking and less reading prepared statements.

It’s pretty obvious from watching good speakers and bad speakers that there’s a pretty wide gulf there, but why? Decker argues that the difference is that people buy into ideas based on emotion, then seek facts to back them up. I see it in myself all the time. Thus, people who bring positive emotion to the table when speaking are the ones that succeed - things like happiness, excitement, energy, temptation, and so forth. The ones who bring negative emotion fail - nervousness, contempt, and so on.

Decker proposes three fundamental truths about making a personal impact:

The spoken word is almost the polar opposite of the written word. Your text is only one small slice of what you communicate when speaking. You also include posture, facial expression, energy level, eye communication, vocal inflection, vocal intonation, volume, gestures, and so on. Your actual words are only one piece of the puzzle.

In the spoken medium, what you say must be believed to have impact. In order for it to be believed, you must be believable - and the easiest way to do that is to believe in what you’re saying with all your heart.

Believability is overwhelmingly determined at a preconscious level. People choose to believe you or not based on a very quick analysis that’s often not based at all on what you’re saying. This is even true in writing (believe me, I’ve had people question everything I say, even when the question is irrational, while others blindly accept everything I say), but it’s very true in speaking with all of those other cues.

Using All of Your Mind
When you first approach a person, they immediately make a snap decision about you: are you a friend or are you a foe? Quite often, this impulse isn’t based on the information you’re hoping to communicate. Instead, it’s a pure first impression - how do you come off at first glance?

The process of that first impression is embedded deep in people. Their sense of who to trust and who not to trust is often set in early childhood and it’s based on very early experiences. People tend to gravitate towards those that show warmth - they smile, they’re willing to embrace, they have humor, and they share.

Decker’s general suggestion is to be natural, energetic, and enthusiastic from the moment you walk into the room. Move towards people, grip their hand with enthusiasm, and engage positively directly with them. Many successful speakers “work the room” a bit before they begin by doing just this - shaking hands and chatting with people for a while before their presentation is even set to begin. This puts at least some of the audience on your side - they identify you as “friend.”

Another key component of building a positive relationship is trust. Do they trust what you’re presenting? The key part of this is for you to trust what you’re presenting. When you trust it, put it out there with pride - you know what you’re saying is right, after all.

Two Key Principles
Decker is sneaky here - there are actually six key principles that he divides into two groups. Decker offers a TON of great tips here - I’m just picking out some that I’ve tried out myself.

Eye Communication Look people in the eye, but don’t stare - do it for a five count. Similarly, try to avoid very short eye contacts (eye darting) or blinking for more than an instant. You can practice by putting Post-It notes of smiley faces up on a wall, then practice speaking to those faces, moving your eyes from face to face with five counts and not blinking heavily, until it becomes natural. When you’re actually speaking, you become less nervous, because your speech transforms into a collection of one-on-one conversations.

Posture and Movement Work on keeping your stomach pulled in, your back straight, and keep your weight slightly toward your audience. Also, move around while talking, but don’t pace - move from one spot to another, stop, then move again.

Dress and Appearance Dress appropriately - conservative is usually better unless you know your audience. If you’re wearing a jacket, you should usually button it (unless it’s a woman’s suit that’s tailored to be open). Ask others for honest feedback, too.

Gestures and the Smile We all have nervous gestures. See if you can find yours - then focus on stopping them (if you can’t figure yours out, ask someone to tell you after watching you speak). Don’t be afraid to exaggerate gestures you’re using for emphasis, like hand sweeps. Also, don’t be afraid to smile - smile as often as you feel is appropriate. Don’t remain stern-faced - it doesn’t help at all.

Voice and Vocal Variety A lower voice is usually better, so work on lowering your voice for speaking occasions. My favorite? Try the King Kong exercise - say “King Kong, Ding Dong, Bing Bong” several times in your natural voice, except lower the final “bong” as much as you can. It actually does work at lowering your voice - I’m working on lowering mine a bit not only for speeches, but for my podcasts.

Words and Nonwords (the Pause) Build your vocabulary by reading challenging things (but learn how to pronounce those words), then use those words in conversation until they’re natural. At the same time, avoid jargon like the plague - technical terms are only appropriate for a highly technical audience. Also, record yourself speaking and work on cutting out all pauses, so that you can choose where to put pauses for emphasis.

The biggest (and best) tip: record yourself as you practice speaking, then watch the recording. It’s very easy for people to identify their own speaking flaws.

Mastering Your First Brain
Many people are simply afraid to speak in public. They’re afraid of vulnerability. They’re afraid of failure. They’re afraid of alienation. All of these fears tie together to build a deep fear of public speaking in people until they avoid it like the plague.

The best way to go from avoiding it to actually doing it is to take baby steps. When you’re in conversation with others, you tell stories, right? Start by simply telling one of those stories to more than one person. Then do it when you’re standing. Then do it to people you don’t know as well. At that point, you’re already doing it - that’s public speaking. The more you do it, the less scary it seems.

What about stage fright? Decker strongly suggests visualization (as it says in Proverbs 27:19, “As a man thinks in his heart, so he is.”). Spend time imagining yourself giving the speech you wish you had the courage to give. Imagine it over and over, with as much detail as you can muster. The more you imagine it, the more comfortable your mind becomes with the idea.

From Information to Influence
Many people view a presentation or speech as an opportunity to relate data. Doing that, though, is a recipe for failure. What you want to actually communicate is an experience - data simply backs up your story and shouldn’t be the focus.

Center any speech or presentation you give around a story. Don’t drown that story in data - instead, just show slices that back up your points (if further data is needed, you can distribute it in another form).

Decker provides a pretty detailed system for creating such a speech or presentation, but I found one idea that stood out above the rest for me: keywords. A speech or presentation should be based on a handful of words, short phrases, or images that you can simply wax at length on - a minute to five minutes. This matches greatly with the Presentation Zen philosophy - your slides can merely be these keywords.

Another key part of a successful speech is attention getting and memory hooking. What can you do to make sure your message stays in their mind? Decker recommends loading your speech up with stories, examples, humor (without overdoing it), analogies, quotations, references to culture, pictures, and visual aids. The more you add of these elements (within reason), the more likely you are to hook into their memories with your message.

Is You’ve Got to Be Believed to Be Heard Worth Reading?
Aside from the wonderful Presentation Zen, this is the single best book on speaking before an audience that I’ve yet read. While the latter book helps you simplify your message, You’ve Got to Be Believed to Be Heard is brilliant at helping you to become a better speaker mechanically by breaking down speaking into lots of little, practicable pieces.

If you’re involved with public speaking - or would like to be - You’ve Got to Be Believed to Be Heard is a very worthwhile read.

A big, big tip: read this book near a computer. Whenever Decker mentions a speaker or a speaking event, look that event up on YouTube and watch it yourself. Doing this made the book really come alive for me and took it from being an interesting book to being an essential book on public speaking.

This is the first entry in a five part series this week on the stages of a relationship and how you can make financially sound choices throughout. Other entries include engagements, weddings, honeymoons, and marriages.

It’s a coming-of-age routine that almost everyone goes through at some point. You’re introduced to someone. That person seems interesting. Eventually, you wind up on a date - and you hope to impress and, perhaps, build something that lasts.

Along the way, though, you often burn through a lot of money buying gifts, paying for dates, and so on. Many people tend to buy into the idea that romance is best represented by breaking out the wallet and doing something impressive (read: expensive).

That’s simply not true. A relationship isn’t built on the money you spend - it’s built on the personalities of the two people involved. Instead of spending a lot of money to impress (and at least in part misrepresent what you’re all about), spend less money in ways that actually have meaning.

Here are ten dating tactics that not only save you money, but also create memorable moments and a solid relationship that can be the foundation for much more.

Never try to act like something you’re not. Many people work hard to put up an enormous “front” that misrepresents several aspects of who they actually are. They drive an expensive car and dress in expensive clothes and go to expensive places, but it’s not sustainable - and they know it. They’re just hoping to create an “image” of some sort of mainstream idea of success. While that might work over the short term, over the long term the other person will see that you built your initial impression on a lie - and that won’t go over well. If you’re looking for anything longer than a quick fling, be yourself. If you don’t, it will eventually backfire - but not until you’ve wasted a lot of money and energy putting up a false front.

Be thoughtful instead of flashy. Flashy, expensive things might do a great job at getting the initial “wow,” but unless it’s also thoughtful and well-considered, it won’t really mean anything at all. The best memories I have from dating my wife are simple moments - putting a lot of effort into building “big” moments are usually wasted. So, bother rarely - or don’t bother at all.

Tell your story - and listen to their story. Many people struggle with things to talk about when they’re first dating someone - and they often replace it with expensive dates and other distractions. In truth, it’s really simple - talk about yourself. What’s your story? What are your interests? What are your passions? What was your life like growing up? What are the ten or twenty best anecdotes or stories you can tell about your life? Your answers to those questions are all the material you need to talk about for hours and hours. Even better, encourage your date to talk about the same things - and listen, and ask follow-up questions. If your date is filled with such conversation, you don’t need expensive distractions.

Give yourself reminders for important occasions. A forgotten birthday or dating anniversary or other occasion can be disastrous. Remembering it, however, and coming through in some way when it’s not expected is golden. Help your memory out by setting up reminders. I use Google Calendar for this. I put in events like birthdays and anniversaries and certain holidays, then have a reminder emailed to me 10 days in advance so I can plan something. This way, I never “forget” - and it’s free.

The community around you offers a lot of free date opportunities - look for them. The average community is loaded with free things to do - here’s 100 of them, for starters. Look around for interesting things to do that don’t damage the wallet. You might be surprised how many engaging things you can do together without spending any money - and, after all, it’s the “together” part that’s important.

Entertainment books can save quite a bit on other dates. What about going out to eat, or doing things like going miniature golfing? An “entertainment book” is a great way to save money on these outings. You can usually pay for an entertainment book by using it just three or four times, which is easy to do if you’re dating regularly. Not sure you’ll use it? Offer to split the cost with a friend, and make a deal - you can take out, say, fifteen of the coupons yourself and then they keep the rest. Then you can cherry-pick the ones you’ll actually use for half the price.

Make something together. Make a meal together. Make a film together. Make a piece of art together. When you create something together, you not only discover countless things about each other, you almost always produce something wonderful, memorable, and shared. Even better, such creative processes are usually quite inexpensive - you’ve got to cook for yourself anyway, and if you already have the supplies, making films or making art together can be very, very cheap, too.

Involve the other person in the things that interest you - and be willing to try their interests, too. You have certain interests and hobbies, as does the person you’re dating. Share them. Have a movie night where you each pick your favorite movie. Have a date where you engage in your favorite hobby and attempt to teach your date, then reverse it the next time. Most of the time, these are very inexpensive dates - but they’re very memorable ones, too, since you often reveal much of yourself when you show what you’re passionate about.

When there are problems, talk about them - don’t “solve” them with gifts. You’re not going to be perfect. You’re going to make mistakes - say things you regret, do things you shouldn’t. Some of those things are likely going to hurt the person you’re dating. Instead of trying to polish over it with gifts, talk about it. Admit your mistakes. Try to understand why the other person is upset. Don’t just try to “make it better” - figure out the real problem and either fix it or find a good solution.

Don’t “force” things to work - sometimes, they’re not meant to be. I know people who have spent countless hours and countless dollars trying to make a relationship work when it’s clearly not working. Never force it. When you find the right person, you’ll fit together quite well without the need to constantly try to “make” it work.

Got any good, reasonable, frugal advice for people who are dating? Please leave them in the comments.

Every other Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal productivity, personal development, or entrepreneurship book.

My desk is a mess.

It’s not so much a factor of having too much stuff - virtually everything on it has a purpose. The problem is that I collect too many little pieces of paper and various other items and I tend to not spend enough time organizing them and dealing with them in a constructive fashion. My desk usually winds up being a mess of notes jotted on pieces of paper, magazines, photocopied articles from the library, books, photographs, and various correspondence that I need to attend to or file away somewhere.

Most days, my focus is on getting creative work done: researching posts, writing them, and working on other directly related tasks. As a result, all of these little pieces of information detritus tend to build up over time into an overwhelming mass that dominates the left hand side of my desk. Once a month or so, I force myself to go through it - and then I’m glad I did, because I seem to always find tons of interesting and useful things in there.

This isn’t a particularly good situation, particularly since in most regards I do a great job of managing my information. I use a mix of the notebook in my pocket, Evernote, and Remember the Milk to manage the vast majority of the information I deal with every day.

Yet the stuff on the left side of my desk keeps piling up.

This is the exact problem that Theo Theobald and Gary Cooper’s Detox Your Desk deals with. If you are involved in a high-information job, how do you handle the accumulation of information on your desk? Let’s dig in and see what they have to say.

Section One - Analysis
Why is your desk cluttered? Theobald and Cooper argue that clutter occurs when a person is attempting to jam too many responsibilities and too much information into the timespace you’ve alloted in your life for the work. The clutter consists mostly of items that you’ve deemed less important than other, more pressing matters - and, over time, those items accumulate. You’ve committed to things that personally you do not view as a high priority.

The solution is you - what do you find important in your work? What things are you regularly viewing as a high priority - and what items are you regularly viewing as a low priority? What aspects of your job bring pleasure to you - and which ones leave you feeling empty?

Eventually, the clutter on your desk can lead you to some real revelations about your job as a whole. There may be whole pieces of your job that you’re simply not able to do well - and you can either accept that and make it a conscious part of your situation or you can attempt to change it (or have it changed) by meeting with your supervisor about it.

For example, I often find that I spend a lot of time researching articles that I have a difficult time humanizing. I’ll wind up tossing a pile of well-annotated photocopied pages onto my pile, sigh as I realize that I couldn’t find a workable article in there, then move on. Eventually, I’ll either use it as an offhand mention in a completely different article or I’ll eventually toss it. Much of my clutter is a call to focus more carefully on what’s actually worth writing about before diving too deep into the research and thought process.

Section Two - Method
Interestingly, one of the primary methods that Theobald and Cooper prescribe for detoxing your desk is to utilize some basic time management tactics. They run through some of the more effective tactics of time management - keeping a to-do list, maximizing your “focus” by staying with one task for a maximum of one hour then taking a break, delegate as much as possible, and so on.

Theobald and Cooper argue that utilizing good time management tactics will automatically help de-clutter your desk, since many of the items that make up the clutter will never reach your desk - or will only reach it for a short time. In the end, though, this isn’t so much a solution as it is an effective way to keep the problem from getting worse.

Another useful tactic: focus on the things you’ve done, not the things you’ve left undone. Even if you only make a little progress in reducing your clutter, view it as a positive, not as a failure (because you didn’t completely de-clutter).

Section Three - The Detox Program
The meat of the book (in terms of getting your desk clean) comes in the final section, which outlines a two week long program for eliminating the clutter on your desk. I found this program rather clever and tried it myself with quite a bit of success (though not perfection).

The main idea is pretty simple. Clear everything off of your desk, put it in a box, and start living out of that box. Eventually, you’ll find that you’re actually just using a small portion of the items in that box - the rest is largely not useful to you on a daily basis. The items that are useful to you stay on your desk - the rest should go elsewhere and should be dealt with in a rational pattern. The only actual work that should be on your desk should be works in progress - if it’s a pending task, that material should be somewhere else (in a folder, perhaps).

This system largely led me to start filing all that clutter into an office filing system that is currently in that same box I started with. A few folders for ideas, a folder for receipts - it’s actually much easier than tossing it into the pile and then stressing out over that pile all the time.

Is Detox Your Desk Worth Reading?
If you’ve got a desk filled with “stuff” and it makes you sick to your stomach when you think about it, Detox Your Desk will be a home run read for you. It certainly was for me - reading it and giving the ideas a shot helped me turn my desk from a chaotic mess into something clean and simple with plenty of room to take on a task.

If you don’t have that problem - or don’t understand why it is a problem - Detox Your Desk will likely be a waste of time for you to read. Of course, if you’re in that group, you’ve likely skipped this review anyway.

I found it valuable. If you’re in a “messy desk” situation like me, you might find it valuable, too.

Over the last few years, I’ve read a ton of time management books and tried out literally hundreds of systems and standalone ideas for maximizing the effectiveness of my time, particularly in terms of my work.

There’s a huge, direct benefit for me when I find a productivity tip that really works. It enables me to get more work done in the same amount of time (allowing me to “grow” The Simple Dollar by writing in more venues or doing other things) or get the same amount of work done in less time (allowing me to spend more time with my family).

Here’s the problem with productivity tips, though. Most of them don’t work. Some are simply inefficient. Others are only efficient in certain situations. Still others only work well for people with certain mindsets.

I’ve tried many, many productivity ideas, yet I keep coming back to the same handful in the end. These tips work for me. They keep me from wasting brain cycles on remembering what I need to do and when I need to do it. They keep me from wasting time bouncing back and forth between projects. I think most of them will work well for you - at the very least, they’re worth trying.

1. Avoid multitasking like the plague.
Every time I attempt to multitask, I wind up doing each task with a lower level of quality than I would have if I had focused on just that task. My concentration isn’t fully sustained on any of the tasks I juggle, so I wind up using only a slice of my brain for each task. That simply results in lower quality work.

I also wind up investing the same amount of time - or even more - when I multitask. That’s because there’s a brief pause each time I switch my primary concentration between multiple tasks. If I keep switching back and forth, those lost seconds start to really add up.

In the end, I’m left with tasks done in a mediocre fashion and, quite often, no time saved at all. That, to me, is a lose-lose.

Here’s the way to solve it: focus on only one task at a time. Let the rest slide. Work on that one task in bursts - at most an hour in length. Then stop and catch up on any incoming messages you need to deal with, take a break, and so on.

How I Do It
When I begin a big task, I shut off everything. I turn off my cell phone and the ringer on our home phone. I close my email program. I shut my office door. I choose music (or similar audio) that’s conducive to concentration. I set the clock to an hour or so. Then I bear down. I do the research. I write the article. I let everything else go. After about five minutes, I usually get into some sort of flow where I fail to even notice what time it is until my clock alerts me that the time is up. When I stop and step back, I usually realize that I’ve completed what seems like a lot of work, far more than I would have achieved with interruptions.

2. Keep a notebook/PDA with you and write down your thoughts.
We all have lots of good ideas float through our heads throughout the day: things we need to do, ideas for future directions, facts we need to look up. In an average day, I usually have twenty or twenty five of these little things bubble up from my subconsciousness.

Many people try to just trap these in their conscious mind until they can do them, but doing that makes it harder to concentrate and really bear down on an important task. You’re using part of your mind to keep that idea locked in place. Thus, you’re unable to devote your full concentration to the task at hand - the multitasking problem all over again.

Instead of doing this, keep a pocket notebook or a PDA with you at all times to jot down any small things that pop into your head. Don’t worry about whether it’s a good idea or not - just get it down on paper and deal with it later. That way, you can go immediately back to whatever task you have on hand instead of wasting brain cycles on trapping that idea.

How I Do It
For years, I used a simple Mead pocket notebook to do this. Quite often now, though, I simply jot the note down using my iPod Touch. I use Evernote to do this. Evernote allows me to see my notes, edit them, and add new ones on my iPod Touch even when I’m offline, but I can access these notes, edit them, and add new ones from any web browser as well. There’s also a useful client program for Windows and for Macs, which I leave open all the time in case an idea pops into my head when I’m working on something - I just switch to Evernote, jot it down, then go back to my main task very, very quickly.

3. Keep an “inbox” and process it once or twice a day.
So, what do you do with all of those jotted down notes - and with all of the other things that come your way in a given day, like mail, miscellaneous tasks people send to you by email, and so on? It’s pretty simple - once or twice a day, process all of it. Take some sort of action on all of those stored-up items - toss them in the trash, file them away, take care of the task, pencil it in on your calendar, or so on.

The goal needs to be eliminating everything in your inbox. You should strive to get to “empty” once a day, with everything in there dealt with in some capacity. If you let it build up, it will grow out of control.

How I Do It
I usually keep two separate “inboxes” - one on the computer and one on the left side of my desk. I pick through each of these at least once a day, usually at the end of the day. I make it my goal to deal with everything in some fashion, so I usually spend time adding to my idea file, taking care of little tasks, adding things to tomorrow’s to-do list (see #5), updating my calendar, updating my grocery list, and so on.

The biggest challenge I had to work through with this was not simply making another pile out of things that needed filing and things that need further reading (like notes for a future post). I’ve recently solved that problem (see #7).

4. Keep a project list - and focus on it at least an hour a day.
We all have a lot of projects that we’d like to work on - projects that aren’t really essential to what we’re doing, but would go a long way towards making life easier once they’re complete. Things like reorganizing the pantry, cleaning out the garage, sorting through all of our kids’ clothes and putting up everything that isn’t at least 3T in size, doing a small marketing project, writing something intriguing but complex, and so on - they vary widely from person to person.

One great method for doing this is Mark Forster’s Autofocus system, which he’s discussed in various forms in his books. It’s pretty simple, actually: you just keep a project list in a college-lined notebook, one project per line. When you finish one, cross it off. When you fill up a page, keep adding projects to the next one. Then, when you’re ready to tackle something, start going through the notebook, browsing all the tasks until you find one you want to do. If you go through a whole page without tackling any projects on it, tear out the page and throw it away since the tasks left on it are ones you aren’t really compelled to do.

Of course, a project list is useless if you don’t use it. Set aside one hour each day where your focus is on one of the projects on your list. Pick one out and make some progress.

How I Do It
I keep a “to-do” list that is a maximum of thirty items long for such projects. I use Remember the Milk to keep this list. I order it by the day that I add a task to the list, so that the oldest one is always at the top of the list. If the list has thirty projects on it and I want to add another one, I simply delete the one on top of the list. When I want to work on something, I start at the top of the list and go down the list until I find one that’s compelling for me to work on at the moment.

This works amazingly well for me. If a task reaches the top of the list and I haven’t taken significant action on it, it’s because on some level I’ve realized that I’m not really that interested in the project. It also keeps my “project list” from getting impossibly big, making it feel like a realistic thing to manage.

5. Keep a SHORT to-do list for each day - four items, max.
I used to weight down my to-do list with way too many things to do. At the end of the day, though, I would not only feel as though I rushed through stuff, I’d feel like I hadn’t really accomplished too much because there was always stuff left on my list.

The solution is pretty simple. Your to-do list should have at most four items on it. Naturally, your day routine will have several other tasks that you do as part of a routine (checking and responding to emails, maintenance tasks, regular meetings, and so on) - don’t include these on your to-do list. Instead, those routine items should be used to fill in the gaps between the big items on your to-do list. Finish off each day with the routine of ensuring your to-do list for tomorrow is ready, but you can/should be assembling it throughout the day.

Construct those items carefully so that they can be done with about fifty minutes of truly focused work. This way, you can complete a task on your to-do list with a single block of focused time (as in tip #1, above). If you need to fit in more work than that on your to-do list, add it to the one for the day after tomorrow, or the day after that.

How I Do It
Again, I use Remember the Milk for this. I just add items throughout the day to my lists, then at the end of the day, I fill up tomorrow’s list to four items with tasks that always need done - drafting posts, researching a particular angle, and so on.

Each day, I live by this list. I close out distractions and focus on one item on the list until it’s done. Then, I do all of my routine tasks in the gaps between these big jobs. If things go well, I might steal an item from the next day’s to-do list if I have time for a fifth thing.

6. Check email only twice a day.
Email is almost always a major time sink. It’s rarely a simple matter of just reading messages. Many messages demand responses, and some messages demand follow-up tasks. Leaving that email window open throughout the day ensures only one thing - your concentration will be interrupted constantly by messages that come in that need responses.

My solution is to simply close the program. Open it only two times a day or so and do an email session, where you deal with everything in your inbox. Then, close the program completely (including notifications) and move onto something else. If it’s truly urgent, someone will come directly to you, so don’t worry about missing out on something vital.

How I Do It
I check my email twice a day. I often do one email session while eating lunch, then a second session just before finishing up tomorrow’s to-do list and quitting for the day (on occasion, I’ll do a third one in the morning before the kids wake up, but this one is often interrupted). My goal with each session is to clear out my inbox - I deal with every message immediately unless it involves a task that’s going to take more than five minutes or so.

7. File things once a day.
This is actually a pretty recent addition to my routine. I had to add it simply because I had a giant pile of things that didn’t need immediate action, but needed to hang around for future reference: statements, prospectuses, post ideas, receipts, magazine articles, and so on. My pile of such items eventually came to dominate my desk and it was often impossible to find anything in there.

To take care of this, I started a very simple filing system in a box that I keep next to my desk. This keeps my desk clear most of the time (giving me space to work on things at hand), plus it enables me to find stuff quickly when I want to find it. The best part? Once the system is in place, it doesn’t take much effort to maintain it - maybe a minute a day. Considering I’d often burn ten minutes digging through the pile finding things, this is a huge time saver for me.

How I Do It
I just made a filing system that makes sense to me, since these are just documents for my own use. Six folders (”to-read,” “2009 receipts,” “post ideas,” “prospectuses,” “2009 account statements,” and “other”). Within each folder, everything is dated and ordered chronologically. It works like a charm for me - I usually have a great idea of when I put things in there, so it’s quite quick to find them. Filing a day’s worth of items takes less than a minute and I’ve had no trouble finding a single thing.

8. Start your day with your major creative or thought-intensive task.
When I start my day, I have a choice of the four items on my to-do list. Which one will I tackle first? I’ve usually had breakfast and a shower and prepared the kids for their day, so I’m wide awake and my brain is running.

I’ve found, time and time again, that starting your day with your most thought-intensive task sets the tone for the whole day. It forces you into prime thinking early on and you can ride that wave throughout most of the day. If I do a major thought-intensive task after several hours of work, my brain turns to mush for the rest of the day. Finishing the day with my easiest task leaves me pretty fresh for my evening activities with my family.

How I Do It
Whenever I look at the day’s to-do list, I always choose the item that seems to be the most thought intensive. That means I do my heaviest thinking earlier in the day, usually ending with an afternoon task or two that doesn’t require nearly as much active thought. I’ll do creative work in the mornings and things like interviews in the afternoon, for example.

9. Take lots of microbreaks (or at least switch to very different tasks regularly).
One of the biggest enemies in a workday is lethargy. It’s easy to find yourself in a low-energy period, sitting there having trouble keeping your eyes open or concentrating on anything. Once you’re there, it’s often very hard to pull yourself out of it - you’re running on low energy for the rest of the day, even if you do rebound a bit.

The best way to combat it is to never let your energy level get that low. That means not sitting at your desk or your work area for long periods. Get up and move on a regular basis. Instead of eating a big, heavy lunch, eat smaller snacks throughout the day. Stretch. Drink water. Do this as often as you can - bookend task sessions with a microbreak where you do these things.

How I Do It
Whenever I finish an isolated block, I take a five minute break. I get up from my desk, walk downstairs, get a drink of water, use the bathroom, stretch a bit, and maybe grab a very small snack (like a granola bar or a piece of fruit).

Doing this has basically eliminated the mid-afternoon energy lull I used to have - around two, I would basically hit a wall and not be productive for the rest of the day. Now, I can keep going until … well, read the next tip.

10. Don’t overwork.
Sure, once in a while, you have to put in some extra hours in order to really do your job well. It’s also important to note that different people have different energy levels for their day.

Given that, though, the worst mistake you can make is to overwork. If you’re nearing the end of the day and you just can’t seem to get anything done, don’t push it. Time and time again, I’ve found that pushing myself to get just a little bit more done at the end of the day has long term negative ramifications. I have a harder time getting going the next morning, for example, and if I do it consistently, my overall productivity slows to a crawl.

How I Do It
If I feel myself starting to slip at the end of a day, I stop. I finish up my day and move on to something else.

Burning myself out with regards to my work is incredibly dangerous and something I take great pains to avoid. Stopping early might slightly reduce my productivity for that given day, but it doesn’t drag down my long-term productivity at all - if anything, it does the opposite, because I’m not burnt out the next day.

Every other Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal productivity, personal development, or entrepreneurship book.

A few weeks ago, I went out to breakfast with a big group. Most of us were engaged in great conversations about blogging and, frankly, Iowa media gossip, but a few people were pretty noticeably withdrawn from the discussion. They were busy checking their Blackberries every five minutes, putting them down and seeming to pay attention, then picking up that Blackberry again.

When the person next to me pulled out his Blackberry for the sixth or seventh time, I asked him if he was expecting something important. “Oh, no, just a crazy start to the day at the office,” he said as his thumbs scrolled through a document. “Shouldn’t you maybe slip out and go put out the fire?” I asked him. “Oh, no, I’d rather be here chatting with you guys,” he said.

Was his statement true? On some level, he might have felt that way, but when he pulled out his Blackberry yet again just a few minutes later, it was clear that both his heart and his mind were already in the office.

Where’s the divide between professional life and personal life for this person? It’s obvious, based on his use of the Blackberry at a breakfast with friends, that the divide is pretty blurry, if there is one at all. That blurring leads to a life that is truly centered around work - and over a long period, often leads to burnout and disenchantment with all of life.

The One-Life Solution, by Dr. Henry Cloud, focuses on this very problem, one that seems incredibly prevalent in modern life. How do we have a successful career without it completely dominating every aspect of our lives? Let’s dig in and see what Cloud has to say.

Identifying the Problem - and the Solution
Cloud gets right to the point. The reason many people find that their personal lives are being overrun by their careers is that they fail to set boundaries between their work and their personal lives. Boundaries create structure within your life, enabling you to firmly separate the professional and personal aspects of your life. Cloud argues that people who fail to create these boundaries are lacking an internal core that gives them the strength to simply put their foot down on issues of personal-professional separation.

Your Vision and Your Boundaries
On some level, people want to be wanted, but when that’s coupled with an inability to set boundaries, it often results in one’s professional life dominating their entire life. Boundaries include six key elements: ownership (who’s running the show), control (who can set the limits), freedom (how much or how little energy one can devote to something), responsibility (who faces the consequences of failure), limits (when and where does a certain part of life begin and end), and protection (disallowing negatives from one part of life to intrude on another part). Most of us struggle with one or more pieces of this puzzle most of the time.

Structure and Boundaries
You are a distinct person. You have your own wants and needs that are completely separate from the needs and wants of everyone else. Boundary issues usually occur when you allow the needs and wants of others to supersede your own wants and needs. For example, you need a certain amount of uninterrupted time each day to focus on your personal needs and interests. When you allow that time to be interrupted because a colleague wants you to do something, you’re giving up much more than a few hours. You’re showing that you’re willing to sacrifice your needs for their wants - a sure sign that you’re not standing up for yourself.

Reclaiming Your Power
So, how do you fix the problem? It’s not as hard as you might think, actually. The first step is to simply take inventory of your life and figure out the areas where you’re failing to set up boundaries. Are you accepting projects that are poorly defined? Are you allowing work projects to interrupt the time you spend with family? Are you incapable of saying “no”? Do you feel guilt about things potentially left undone? Try to identify what is compelling you to violate the barriers you want in your life.

The Audit
Once you start to figure out what exactly is wrong, take an audit of your life. Be mindful and look for the situations where you find yourself falling prey to violating the separation you want. Who is causing you to break these barriers? What projects are causing the problems, and why? Study your own life carefully and look for the patterns. One good way of doing this is by keeping a detailed time diary for a month or two, detailing what you’re doing every fifteen minutes or half hour of every single day.

The Laws of Boundaries
It’s very difficult to give up the patterns of life that leave you with little true personal time. Here, Cloud offers some tough encouragement to make some changes. The piece of the chapter that really hit home with me was the idea that you sow what you reap. One of the big reasons why I felt a need to draw a boundary between my personal life and my professional life was that I worried about becoming the father in the song Cats in the Cradle - a person who didn’t have enough time for my kids when they were young, only to find that they didn’t have enough time for me when they grew up. I then reflected on my own relationship with my parents, particularly with my mother - she always made plenty of time for me and now, as an adult, I love making time for her. She’s not just my mom, she’s one of my best friends, because I know she will always be there for me until she draws her last breath, and I, without hesitation, will be there for her. You sow what you reap.

You and Your Words
Quite often, when faced with situations where someone or something is trying to stretch out of its barriers, we know that we should say no, but our words undermine what we want. We find ourselves agreeing and then, later, we regret it desperately. Cloud walks through many common situations where this occurs, but the real underlying message here is to always ask for more information when you’re unsure and take time before giving your answer (so you can realize that you need to say no or at least set some limits on the commitment).

Make the “No-Choice” Choices First
What about the things that you simply can’t choose? I know a big handful of system administrators who are constantly on call for their job - if the servers go down at 2 AM, they get called and they go in to the office. For them, this is not a choice - it’s a requirement. Cloud argues that there is no aspect of professional life that is truly a “no choice.” In fact, he argues that any “requirement” that truly reduces the quality of your life should be discussed in detail in an attempt to find a better solution that doesn’t knock down barriers in your life.

Follow the Misery and Make a Rule
What if your job isn’t filled with strict requirements to fill your life, but it somehow seems to eat up all of your time? Quite often, there’s just a single root cause (or perhaps two). Spend some time evaluating why you let those walls break down. Track those influences down to their root cause. Is it a person who pushes too much? Is it a confluence of too many responsibilities? Dig down to that root cause, then develop a clear rule to handle it and give you the space you need - and make that rule clear to the people who may simply expect you to break it.

Time, Space, and E-Mail
With the prevalence of Blackberries and other such devices, many people carry their jobs along with them in their pocket. In many ways, it makes the work-life barrier very low - you can just pick up that device and check in on your work quite quickly, after all. My solution for this kind of problem is the same as Cloud’s: turn the device off and leave it somewhere where you can’t easily access it. If something is constantly breaking down your barriers, you need to avoid that thing. This ties directly into the need to focus on tasks - the best way to get something important done is to simply shut off all possible distractions. Close the email program. Turn off the phone. Shut the web browser. Then, focus on what you need to get done.

Getting Your Balance Sheet in Order
Here, Cloud connects all of this to personal finance. Many people put up with such issues at work and allow work to pervade their personal life because they simply cannot afford to lose the job. If they say “no,” they’re worried the boss will simply find someone who will say “yes” and you’ll be jobless. This is a brilliant argument for sound financial planning. You should always have a strong emergency fund to help protect you against job loss. Living below your means at all times is simply a strong tactic, all around - your boss then loses that bit of financial leverage over you.

End Some Things Now
If there is a long term negative in the workplace - an uncooperative employee, an inscrutable task - that does nothing more than bring down everyone that is involved with it, it’s vital that some sort of resolution is reached as soon as possible. Negatives that don’t seem to ever be going away do nothing more than bring you down and likely bring others down as well. Address it now, not later.

Communicating Your Boundaries
One final stumbling block: how do you make it clear to others what your boundaries are without creating additional problems? This is difficult for nearly everyone. The best approach is to explain things calmly - don’t get angry or aggressive, but state things clearly and firmly. Remember, no aspect of your life should ever have absolute dominion over your whole life. In the end, you get what you tolerate.

Is The One-Life Solution Worth Reading?
Some people have a natural knack for feeling completely in control of their life. For others, it’s not quite so easy, and their personal boundaries seem to get trampled over and over again. If you find yourself in that latter camp, The One-Life Solution is an excellent read. It’s thorough, detailed, and insightful - you will wind up with a lot of food for thought and a lot of tactics to use to handle your situation.

If anything, The One-Life Solution is a bit too broad. Cloud gets into specifics with many workplace and life-boundary issues, but so many different scenarios are addressed that the book sometimes feels unfocused. If you’re looking for solutions for a specific problem, there are large swaths of the book that can be skimmed.

Nevertheless, there is a lot of great advice between the covers here.

Every other Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal productivity, personal development, or entrepreneurship book.

Lately, I’ve been working hard on improving my presentation skills. Why? As The Simple Dollar gets more and more popular, more and more opportunities come my way for presentations. I hear things like “Can you give a ten minute talk to get people excited about money management and frugality?” all the time.

When I go into these situations, it would be very easy to just throw up a few PowerPoint slides of the best stuff from The Simple Dollar, more or less just read the slides, and get off the stage as soon as possible. I see other presenters doing this all the time. Here’s the thing, though: those “read the slide” presentations are boring. It’s very rare that they contain a message that people will remember. If the people in the audience look back on the presentation, it’s likely that they look back with boredom.

If you’re involved in a career where presentation is a regular part of your work - or you dream of such a career - presentation skills are an invaluable part of your skill set. If you want your presentation to be valuable - and thus have the audience perceive you as valuable - you need to learn how to give a truly compelling presentation, one they won’t forget. That’s basically the whole message behind Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen. Reynolds argues that most presentations are far too complicated and that simplicity is the key to great presentations - an idea I strongly agree with. More importantly, the book revolves around showing one how to do this.

Let’s dig in and see what we can learn.

Introduction
Presentation Zen opens by simply stating that presentations and written documents are very different things, but many people apply the same principles to presentations that they apply to their documentation (Reynolds refers to this as “Death by Powerpoint”).

In essence, a document is usually intended as a reference point - a collection of facts and information about a topic. On the other hand, when you present, you’re striving to tell a story. The document, in many ways, supports the presentation - it provides the little details that support the larger story you’re trying to tell.

The best presentation is one that tells a story that engages the crowd in as many ways as possible. This story has very little to do with the slides themselves - the story comes from you, not the slides. The slides should only be used if they directly support the story you want to tell, not to inundate with facts and details.

Preparation
When most people sit down to begin a presentation, they fire up PowerPoint and open up a template. Right there, you’re restricting yourself and the story you can tell.

Instead, Reynolds suggests starting with a much different slate: paper, whiteboards, an array of Post-It notes. Remember, you’re not making slides - you’re telling a story, so you want to put together the pieces of that story.

I particularly like using the Post-It method. It allows me to spread out all of the little pieces of the story and then easily rearrange them, remove them, add new ones, or do whatever I want.

The key, though, is to focus in on one key thing: what is the central point of the story I’m telling? When you go up there, you’re trying to communicate one key message. Can you state the entire point of your presentation in one sentence? If you can’t do that, you need to rethink what you’re presenting. Once you’ve got things whittled down to that one sentence, the entire flow of your story should go to reinforce and support that point. That’s your story.

Every slide you show should do nothing but provide the bare facts that support your point. If you want to provide supplementary material with more detail, have a takeaway document (or some other type of side presentation) that provides that detail.

Design
So, what should those slides look like? Most likely, you’ll start by tossing together the general outline of your story in slide form. That can be a start, but there’s one fundamental question you should be asking about each slide you toss up there: what value does this slide have? Is it providing any value that I’m not providing standing there speaking?

If your slide is nothing more than a reiteration of what you’re saying in bullet point form, then that slide is useless. If your slide has images that aren’t related to what you’re saying, those images are useless. Instead, every slide should contain only text, images, and pictures that actually contribute something to your story.

If you’re talking about something tactile and real, you should have a slide that depicts it. If you’re talking about some data, you should have a slide that displays that data as minimally and simply as you can - cut out all of the irrelevant data. Images are a great addition to each slide, as long as they’re not distracting from the main point and also that they cue some sort of emotion in the audience, an emotion that you want to be there.

This section offers a ton of great little tips for making great slides: making sure that pictures of people are facing your point and not looking away, using images as your backgrounds (and not those generic PowerPoint images), making sure that your slides all have a cohesive theme, and so on. The key, though, is to make sure that the slides really are doing everything they can to complement the story you’re telling.

Delivery
The biggest point here, from my perspective, is to watch a lot of great presentations by great presenters. Scavenge around on the internet for videos of presentations that are considered excellent and note the things that they do. Often, you’ll see that they eliminate barriers between themselves and the audience (meaning no podiums), they are self-deprecating and loose, and they’re paying attention to the audience and responding to their responses (which turns the presentation almost into a conversation).

In the end, that’s the real truth of the situation: a presentation is part of a conversation that you’re having with the crowd. You’re telling them something you’re excited about and enthusiastic about, and you want them to be excited and enthusiastic, too.

The Next Step
Merely practicing your presentation skills isn’t enough to keep growing as a presenter. You need to continue to grow as a person. Meet people. Grow in your knowledge, not just in your topic area, but in new areas, too. Look for opportunities all throughout your life to learn and to share what you know (using those presentation skills). Presenting is just the beginning of the conversation.

Is Presentation Zen Worth Reading?
I am of the belief that the ability to communicate well with others is truly a key part of modern life. Communicating well allows you to spread your ideas to others. It allows you to build connections with people. It allows a lot of people to gather an impression of you and even begin to build a connection with you. In short, knowing how to communicate is a giant benefit for most people in the modern world.

If you have any interest in improving your ability to communicate with others - and not just presentations, either - Presentation Zen is practically essential reading. It made me carefully reconsider how I communicate with others, not just in terms of when I give a presentation, but when I converse with someone I don’t know well. How can I tell a compelling and interesting story? That’s really what this book is about: storytelling.