Structure your speech for Maximum Impact

“Tell them what you’re going to say. Say it. Then tell them what you said” And that is so true!! We have such short attention spans. And so do audiences. If we want to make a point that will stay with an audience after they leave the room, we have to repeat and reinforce it throughout the presentation. Introduce your well defined theme. Present that theme. And repeat it to conclude. You will have given your audience a great chance of remembering it.

Fire Destroys Rodney Hall's Coastal Home The New South Wales south coast home of poet and novelist Rodney Hall was destroyed by fire on 6 August 2005. The Canberra Times (10 August 2005) reported Marion Halligan saying that Hall's 'entire life's work had been in the house and he had planned to sort it out to give to the National Library of Australia, but kept postponing the task because of the mass of paper.' Halligan, who described the loss as 'absolutely heartbreaking', said Hall was a 'paper man' known to prefer writing by hand. Hall told his publisher Fran Bryson of the Bryson Agency Australia that while the loss was tragic, at least no-one was hurt. A two-time winner of the Miles Franklin Award, Hall was awarded a Centenary Medal for service to Australian arts in 2001 and in 2003 received an honorary Doctor of Literature from The University of Queensland in recognition of his distinguished career and his contribution to Australian literature. Hall's most recent novel is The Last Love Story : A Fairytale of the Day After Tomorrow.

Five fast email productivity tips

There’s been a lot of great discussions about email productivity going around on sites I enjoy, so I thought I’d throw in five no-brainers that I’ve seen help a lot of folks. Shut off auto-check - Either turn off automatic checking completely, or set it to something reasonable, like every 20 minutes or so. If you’re doing anything with new email more than every few minutes, you might want to rethink your approach. I’m sure that some of you working in North Korean missile silos need real-time email updates, but I encourage the rest of you to consider ganging your email activity into focused (maybe even timed) activity every hour or three. Process, tag, respond to the urgent ones, then get the hell back to work. (See also, NYT: You There, at the Computer: Pay Attention) Pick off easy ones - If you can retire an email with a 1-2 line response (< 2 minutes; pref. 30 seconds), do it now. Remember: this is about action, not about cogitating and filing. Get it off your plate, and get back to work. On the other hand, don’t permit yourself to get caught up in composing an unnecessary 45-minute epistle (see next item). Write less - Stop imagining that all your emails need to be epic literature; get better at just keeping the conversation moving by responding quickly and with short actions in the reply. Ask for more information, pose a question, or just say “I don’t know.” Stop trying to be Victor Hugo Marcel Proust, and just smack it over the net—especially if fear of writing a long reply is what slows your response time. N.B.: This does not mean that you should write elliptically or bypass standard grammar, capitalization, and punctuation (unless you want to look 12 years old); just that your well-written message can and should be as concise as possible. That saves everyone time. Cheat - Use something like MailTemplate to help manage answers to frequent email subjects. Templates let you create and use boilerplate responses to the questions and requests to which you usually find yourself drafting identical replies over and over from scratch. At least use a template as a basis for your response, and then customize it for that person or situation. Don’t worry—you can still let your sparkling prose and winning wit shine through, just without having to invent the wheel 10 times each day. Be honest - If you know in your heart that you’re never going to respond to an email, get it out of sight, archive it, or just delete it. Guilt will not make you more responsive two months from now, otherwise, you’d just do it now, right? Trust your instincts, listen to them, and stop trying to be perfect.

Ten Steps to Win-Win Negotiating.

Negotiating confidence Negotiating can be a challenge. Sometimes we watch successful negotiators at work and wonder if it is an ability they were born with. But with a little time, information, and preparation you can head for the negotiating table with confidence. 1. Be prepared. Define your objectives and use lateral thinking to brainstorm possible ways they can be achieved. 2. Research the other party’s objectives and brainstorm the methods they may use. “Find the edge” – any pressure points or hidden agendas. “Information is power.” 3. Prepare yourself and the way you use the venue. Choose your seating for power, your clothes and your attitude. 4. Establish a cordial relationship on opening the meeting. Specify the aims of the meeting. 5. Raise less contentious issues first. 6. Promote harmony, minimise the negatives and articulate areas of commonality. 7. “Win-win” means compromises on both sides, so be prepared to bargain. Start with two lists – your must-haves and your might-haves, and start with a higher level than you expect to obtain. Highlight the contribution of your concession to the other person’s objectives. 8. Be prepared to release information at times beneficial to your cause. Use silence. 9. Listen for surprises. 10. Articulate the agreed outcomes and any timelines, or they may collapse. Use detailed preparation and the win-win method and you have the tools to approach negotiation with confidence.

Discover great new writers This list of mini-reviews is issued seasonally, by Barnes and Noble. There are details of the selection process and archived lists.

Nothing better to talk about Some say the art of conversation is dying -- I suspect we have always talked about nothing much for most of the time.

Looking for a good book?

This article just may help - Gary Price has written Going Under Cover with Book Search Tools "Google, Amazon and others offer really useful "search inside the book" tools, but they're not always the easiest features to use. Here's a closer look at getting the most from online book search services." Read the whole article.