Photo by Nic McPhee, Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

PowerPoint has done something truly remarkable. It has exaggerated the presentation tendencies of presenters everywhere. Good presentations have become great, but boring presentations have become unbearable. Here are eleven recommendations to keep in mind when creating a PowerPoint presentation that should help you stay in the former, and from the latter.

Photo by fhwrdh, Licensed under CC BY 2.0

Have you ever worked on a project where deadlines were too tight? Then chances are that the atmosphere on the team wasn’t quite the best because team members had to work ridiculous hours and still didn’t get their workloads done and clients weren’t happy. Chances are, too, that this resulted from underestimating the amount of time needed to get work done. Here is a technique that helps you accurately estimate the time it takes to complete a project.

Photo by Vinoth Chandar (edited), Licensed under CC BY 2.0

A great quote can provide personal inspiration and can be used to educate others. Some of the best and brightest leaders throughout history left behind some great advise that helps guide the way to better leadership. Here is a collection of the most useful wisdom that might just make you rethink your current leadership strategy, or point the way for how to better motivate your team and yourself.

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The more varied businesses get in how they are constructed and run, the more management mistakes I see being made. This is only to be expected, of course, and to a degree, we're all re-learning how to run our businesses. For the first time in my memory, the remote worker is a viable option for many businesses. Time cards are going out of style, as is the concept of business hours. So what management mistakes are being made, and how can we avoid them? Here are some of my thoughts.

Bringing talented people on your team is only half the battle. Only if you can get your team to cooperate well will their joint efforts lead to increased productivity in the workplace. Find out what makes these great teams from movies and TV so effective and how you can transfer their skills to the world of your office work.

Photo by Daniel Friesenecker (CC0 1.0)

When I first started in business, meeting notes were a formal thing. There was someone in on the meetings who knew how to take minutes, the format, and the important information to contain therein. As time has passed, I see less and less of this in the professional space, and I honestly don't see that we're missing much by keeping notes in new, less-formal ways. As always, though, innovation can lead to complication if we forget the reasoning behind the practice. With all of the note-taking options available to us, it can be easy to sacrifice efficiency and effectiveness for the sake of the new and shiny.

Photo by Sebastien Wiertz, Licensed under CC BY 2.0

It's funny: I've never been more connected with my coworkers, yet I don't know that I've ever seen more office confusion than I have as of late. We're catering to the communication habits of millenials, and in a lot of ways, this has benefited the office environment. However, with an ever-increasing variety of communication methods, the need to ensure that we are using effective communication has never been more paramount to success. Here are some ideas for ridding your office of confusion by communicating effectively.

E-mail is a tool intended to facilitate communication and help you get your work done. If well managed, the inbox can become the central hub of your workflow through which you coordinate your work and conveniently exchange information that is essential to your business goals. Here are some practical and effective strategies for taming your e-mail inbox.