What’s the most important meal of the day for your body? Breakfast, of course.   Why? It establishes your metabolism and gives your brain fuel to operate well.  Just the same, if not moreso, breakfast is the most important meal for your mind too.  One braniac refers to the most important hour of your day: Hour One.  What you put into your mind during Hour One is critical. So what do you feed it? When you check your email, you graze on the random. Yet, many of my friends start out EVERY day by doing just that.  Think about the message that your Inbox (with 100 or more emails waiting to be answered) sends to your subconcious: “We are behind, overwhelmed, hurry!”

I am so guilty of this. I wake up in the morning by my iPhone alarm, sit up on the edge of the bed and read email. It is no wonder that after that I have trouble focusing on any reading or study. Read the rest of Tim’s thoughts and recommendations on this topic at Sanders Says.

And seven steps to salvation. Tools, techniques, and technologies to
make your meetings less painful, more productive — even heavenly.

The Seven Sins of Deadly Meetings

A variety of tools and techniques (plus a healthy dose of common sense) can make meetings less painful, more productive, maybe even fun. There’s also an important role for technology, although the undeniable power of computer-enabled meeting systems usually comes with astronomical price tags. Still, there’s lots to learn from electronic “meetingware” even if you never buy it. What follows is Fast Company’s guide to the seven sins of deadly meetings and, more important, seven steps to salvation.

Cure the Sick-Meeting Ills

Many people dread meetings for being time consuming, pointless, and boring.

The primary reason for meetings is to share or brainstorm information or to develop action steps toward accomplishing a goal. Period. But if this were the result of most corporate meetings, people wouldn’t moan and groan when they learn that another meeting is going to be held. From our experience facilitating and attending meetings, we’ve found that bad meetings have similar traits regardless of the industry, company, or project:

12 Tips for Creating Better Presentations

You have a presentation to create. It’s important. But, formatting diagrams can take forever and the text on your slides seems to have a mind of its own. Then, there’s the sad fact that everybody’s PowerPoint presentations look the same.

Sound about right? If so, I’ve got good news for you! Creating professional, unique presentations can be much easier than you might think.

This article will help you find the right tools to get exactly the presentation you want. We’ll look at three components of creating effective presentations, and provide timesaving tips to help send your presentation off in style.