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One of the hot
business books these days is
“The Four-Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the
New Rich.”
The book is all about how to make more money with less
effort.
But at
Speechworks, we feel that the author left out a key idea: making
better speeches with less effort.
The author
Timothy Ferriss purports to detail how you can make far more money
with far less work. He claims to have gone from making
$40,000 a year working eighty hours a week, to making $40,000 a
month while working only four hours a week.
We’ll let you
judge whether his ideas can grow your bank account with less work.
But he certainly does offer some excellent time management ideas.
He suggests dramatically cutting back on the amount of time spent
checking e-mail and carefully reviewing what activities we
consider to be most productive.
Save Time Creating
Better Presentations
At Speechworks,
we feel that he left out how you can save a dramatic amount of
time when creating business presentations. People waste too much
time carefully crafting dozens of PowerPoint slides, when
virtually none of those slides will have any real impact on the
audience.
Instead, we
recommend that you begin preparing a presentation by taking out a
blank sheet of paper and a pen. Then ask yourself, “What are the
three most important things that I want my audience to remember
when I’m done.”
What are Your Three
Core
Ideas?
The three points
should be the three substantive ideas that are at the core of your
message. Maybe the points are:
-
Our sales
results last month were down.
-
We did a poor
job finding new prospects
-
We need to
double the number of prospects we see each month.
Make your three
core points your “Agenda Slide.” Then have one or two slides for
each of your three points. Then begin rehearsing.
Most people waste
hours creating forgettable slides that
undermine their presentations.
We don’t know if
these presentation idea ideas will allow you to work only 4-hours a week. But
they
will help you be a better presenter in far less time.
At Speechworks we
help our clients learn how to communicate in a way that connects
and persuades. If you’re interested in becoming a great
communicator give us a call at 404-266-0888 or check out our
website at
www.speechworks.net. |
