I am really passionate about presentations and presentation design. Why? Simple, I hate wasting people's time! Imagine you are doing a one hour presentation in front of 24. If your presentation is boring then you just wasted one day of a persons lifetime!

So how can you make sure that you do not bore people to death with your presentations? Well, there are a couple of ways. First of all make sure to check out presentation zen. Garr Reynolds is the brain behind the site and it has lots of great tips on how to become better at presenting something. Perhaps the best advise I got from Garr was to look at public advertisements as an inspiration for crafting a message.

Everybody knows that people do not look at boring things. However what could be more boring then your standard slide featuring a list of bullet points on a white background. Even the interestingness of your flashy company logo will not save you if you serve one boring slide after another.

So everyday while waiting for your bus or train, look out for advertisements which make you look. Then think about why you like them and how they caught your attention. Was it the typeface, an interesting image or the composition?

You might say "Wait a second but I am not selling any goods with my presentations so why should I dress them up like an advertisement", well, in a way you are always selling something. It might be an idea, inspiration or you want to make people think about a certain topic.

So have a look around and see if you can find some inspirations. They might help you to make your slides a little bit better.

Last month I saw someone using YouTube as a music player and thought "what a neat idea!". I mean it is quite obvious once you see it. YouTube has all the ingredients to make it work: lots of music videos and a playlist feature called quicklist which allows you to play a list of videos in a defined order.

You can even take it one step higher. There are lots of air apps (e.g. FLVPlay) which remove the need to use the limiting web interface and replace it with a much richer user experience by using flash.

So the next time you are at a party and you need a music player just use YouTube's quicklist feature.

Some time ago Stefan Sagmeister showcased a funny guerrilla art project on TED. The artist sticks speech bubbles onto public advertisement and then the pedestrians fill the blank spots with their own thoughts.

In his talk he showed a lot of funny bubbles already however there is also a website which allows you to browse throw a lot of those bubbles and some of them are truly hilarious. Have a look.

Photo courtesy of Bubble Project

While visiting a post office in Switzerland I stumbled upon a really nice idea on how lost keys can be returned to their owners.

The idea is simple, you buy a tag which you add to your keychain. Engraved on the tag is a unique number which is linked to your address. Now, if someone finds your keychain on the street the tag tells the person to throw it in the next postbox. Then the post just look up the address using the ID and mail the keychain back to you. All you have to pay is the postage fee. Beautiful idea and nicely executed. Would love to have the same service in Germany. The service provider has a website which can be found here.

Pretty early on in my professional career I started using simple todolists for organizing my life. However in the beginning of this year I had to realize that my system could not scale to the point were it could support multiple complex projects at the same time. I had the feeling that I was losing control. During that time I used physical and virtual todolists (tadalist). Since I came under extreme pressure I started looking for new ideas and approaches for managing my workload. Then I stumbled across "Getting Things Done" short GTD. It is an easy framework for managing your life/projects orginally developed and published by David Allen. The following graphic gives you a quick overview how it works.

In my case I did not completely adopt GTD. Instead I improved my own approach with ideas from GTD. The biggest change for me was the usage of a so called "hipster PDA".

As you can see it is nothing more than a bunch of index cards which are being hold together by a paperclip. On these cards I note immediately if something pops up in my head which demands an action. By doing so I effectively remove a lot of stress which comes from worrying that I might forget to do something. At the end of every day I look which stuff I actually want to do and sort it into my actual todo-system. My favourite thing about the "hipster PDA" is that I always throw away the old cards. Therefore old tasks cannot distract me anymore. That's one thing I never liked about traditional notebooks.

Another GTD rule, I strictly follow, is that you should do everything which takes less than two minutes straight away. By doing so I effectively remove all the small tasks which normally clutter my todolists.

For organizing all my todos I use stikkit which offers more functionality than tadalist. Especially the tagging support and the possibility to schedule tasks in a calendar + email reminders are two features which I do not want to miss.

Adopting GTD is not done overnight since you have to tweak it in a way that it supports your own style of working. However I adopted a lot of the core ideas and could see how they improved my productivity and reduced my stress level.

For more information regarding GTD look at the most known website on GTD 43folders or check out the book from David Allen.