Communicate your agenda or follow other's dreams - Blog

One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus; we never concentrate our power. Most people dabble their way through life, never deciding to master anything in particular. Tony Robbins

Today I want to help you to stay focused on your objectives and how you can help your team to stay focused on what is important for you.

When I worked in a jungle of matrix organization I had several bosses. Each of them was most important (of course) and had many urgent requests. That was good therapy for my ‘can-do attitude’. To stay sane I started to study essentialism. As a result, I created a set of my own goals and objectives. Then started furiously follow my agenda and reduce energy non-essential work (unavoidable, but manageable). The next challenge was that I lost my focus under the pressure of emergencies. To avoid this I reviewed my goals every day in the morning.

Things get more complex when you need to communicate your agenda to your team.

There are many techniques for communicating your agenda to your team:

list dates as bullet points and sends them in an email to the team
create an MS Project with dozens of the task and put it on Sharepoint
call a meeting and tell everyone what’s the plan
the list may go on

These never worked well for me. I believe that the message must have a bit of positive emotion. Just a bit. This could be a nice-looking piece of content. I want to show you a few of my samples and encourage you to use them. You will realize that you can create even better ones.

What I like about PowerPoint is it is not only a presentation tool. You can save a slide as a PDF and then print a big poster. Remember to use PDF as output format. It will stay sharp no matter what page size you will print it on.

The other way I use PowerPoint is to create desktop wallpaper for my team with the project schedule. I save a slide as a png or jpeg file and my wallpaper is ready!

The design I used is a mix of flat formal-looking elements with some hand drawn sketches to make the whole calendar a bit relaxed but not too much. This way agenda is nice to look at and will stand out among other stuff on the board.

Try to create your own versions. Let me know what do you think. Does it work for you?
Marcin,
infoDiagram.com

Further articles on presentation graphics

For more inspiration on using visuals in your presentations, check out these articles as well:

Looking for more creative presentation graphics? Get on our newsletter and never miss an announcement. You’ll stay informed about all of our new updates. Plus, if you sign in for our newsletter you’ll get a Creative slide design guide with free hand drawn shapes, absolutely free!

Marcin, from infoDiagram

P.S. This is my first blog post. What do you think about it? Do you think the topic and the content make sense? Thanks for getting to this point.