Presenter’s tools. And stuff.

I’m a professional speaker and presentations trainer. And author. And father and husband. My life isn’t structured, but it’s full on. Really, really full on. As a result I rely on a number of bits of technology to help me stay ahead of the game. Some of them you’ll have heard of, some you might not have: I hope it’s useful to you.

• Skype and stuff. Everyone knows Skype, right?  It’s how my team chat when we need to interact. And when we need to work together on documents we use google docs. Sometimes we use them together, so that we’re talking to each other at the same time as working on a document together – the result is a big boost to productivity, when we use them together.
• Evernote. Lord, I love Evernote. If you’ve not used it, where have you been?!? It’s a great note-taking app that works on any computer, so that you can have things available anywhere – and the list of tricks it has up its sleeve is truly remarkable. It takes recording, images, text and so on, and has a damned good guess at optical character recognition in those images, too. In fact as far as I can figure it, the only thing it doesn’t do is make me cups of tea. Speaking of things being available everywhere, I use Dropbox and Google Drive a lot, for storing files and making them accessible on any computer (after a wifi sync, of course!).
• Insightly. A lot of what I do as a speaker is based upon relationships with people. Insightly helps me keep track of what I’ve said to who – and it’s a handy (though by no means cutting edge!) project management system. It’s one of the best Client Relationship Managers around, beaten only by a couple of cripplingly expensive ones, but it’s far from the best Project Management software around. The reason I use it is the ability to have one package do both is worth the compromise, for me. Oh, and it plays nicely with google’s mail and google calendar.
• My iPhone. I’m not surgically attached and I’m thinking of moving to a Fairphone next time my contract is up – but I love the amount of tech packed into one tiny little box – particularly Siri. It’s a great way of grabbing ideas on the go and of making diary entries etc. Speaking of diaries, I use the built-in calendar apps on my Mac and iPhone. And, of course, they’re linked to each other using Google Calendar – enter on one machine and they’re all magically synced. As you can imagine with dozens of disparate projects (not to mention family responsibilities) a smoothly running diary is an absolute must!
• One particularly handy trick we’ve used recently as a family man is to give my wife access to my calendar. Not only does she know where I am but she can also make appointments on my behalf. No more making provisional arrangements with friends pending checking with me – she can just find out if I’m free immediately! We use different calendars for different bits of work (one for delivery, one for administration, another for my charity work) and a different one for household/domestic arrangements, so we can see what’s what immediately.
• I have a new car. It’s lovely. It makes driving to gigs a pleasure. Obviously I use public transport whenever i can, for ethical and environmental reasons but some venues just aren’t reach-able by train and bus. That used to be wasted time. It’s all well and good to say I could listen to podcasts and so one while I drove but my old car didn’t have a way of connecting to my iPhone and driving with headphones on is a really, really bad idea! Now, thanks to the magic of bluetooth I can not only listen to podcasts but also make phone calls. Either business or personal – all I have to do is push one button on my steering wheel and say the name of who I want talk to. ohhhhhhh lovely!
• Staying in hotels (or even friends’ houses) is okay as far as it goes but they don’t always have good exercise facilities. Now…….. what I use isn’t as good as a proper gym, but it’s better than nothing – it’s an exercise band. Essentially it’s a few feet of latex to provide resistance. For example, to simulate the effort of a bicep curl with a free weight in the gym I simply stand with one foot on one end of the resistance band and hold the other – doing a curl stretches the band, so it feels like I’m lifting weights. With a session of my personal trainer dedicated to showing me how to use it, there’s very little that can’t be worked on, at least in part!
• Oh, and finally a quick shout to my trusty MacBook Air, loading with Pages and Keynote. If you’ve never used Mac, try it. If you have, i don’t need to tell you how far ahead of PowerPoint Keynote is in terms of productivity and interface.  I’m not as fast in a hotel room as I am in the office on the big screen, but the loss of productivity isn’t as bad as I feared.
• By the way, a bit of inventive use of iTunes (on any device) and you’re got access not just to podcasts but to iTunesU.  You’ve never heard of it? No? You’re missing out – check it out!

So that’s it – a quick rush-through of the things I’m using at the moment. It’s not comprehensive but it’s hopefully useful.  What’s your poison? :)