You want to be successful, then follow this simple guideline.

WE'RE all busy. We all have infinite to-do lists that fill up faster than we can cross off the most urgent tasks. Being busy makes you feel productive, but it could be getting in the way of your most important project: YOU.
 

"Busy" is the most common reason people give me for not doing anything to build their brand so they can advance their career. They make time for emails and meetings and teleconferences, but they don’t capture the true benefits of all those activities. Working in their career is getting in the way of working on their career. Sound familiar?

Well, here’s the one personal branding habit you can’t be too busy for.

Document your wins. What’s the easiest way to do that? Keep a job journal.
Why? When you take a minute to jot down the day’s achievements, you:

1. Acknowledge what makes you great. Your team members and clients are too busy to notice your daily victories, so it’s important to take a brief moment for self-congratulations. It’s a great confidence builder, and it helps you quantify and assess your strengths. Don’t forget to record the seemingly small triumphs, even the personal ones ("met the deadline despite cranky vendors … stayed calm under pressure!").

2. See the difference between meeting goals because of motivation and meeting goals despite burnout. If you take an extra 90 seconds and record not only what you achieved, but how it felt to accomplish the task, you’ll get a great reality check. You’ll realise which activities and co-workers make you happy and which ones fill you with dread. This self-awareness is critical as you decide where you want to go with your career. It’s not just about "doing", it’s about doing the things that energise you. This will also help you know when to take action, giving priority to the projects that will have the greatest impact for your career, your team and your company.

3. Get a clear picture of the kind of work you are doing. Do you find yourself in leadership roles? Are you perfectly content to execute someone else’s plans? Which types of projects do you prefer? Are you repeating an inefficient process over and over?

4. Shine during your weekly or monthly team meeting with your boss. You can speak clearly and articulately about all you accomplished in the prior week or month, and you’ll be the one with the latest facts when it’s time to deliver a progress report.

5. Easily prepare a dazzling portfolio for your annual review – the one that’s tied to your bonus and promotion! If you’ve written them down, you’re not going to forget those great things you did in January when you get to your annual review in December. At the end of the year, you’ll have a complete list of accomplishments – approximately 260 entries. You can go through the list and highlight, sort, combine – whatever suits your style. And you’ll have a competitive edge, because you’ll have well-organised evidence. Instead of a vague conversation, you can have a full-blown presentation that showcases all the times you saved the company money, brought in business, made customers happy, and otherwise saved the day. If you’re invited to interview at another organisations, these materials (except confidential ones, of course) translate into a great career-marketing portfolio. If you’re in business for yourself, a job journal is even more essential because it can enhance your pitch.




Documenting your success can help you get ahead.

 

So how do you do it? Follow these three steps:

1. Choose a consistent place and time of day. The job journal should become one of your favorite habits.

2. Until it becomes a habit, add it to your do-list or calendar. It’s an important activity that deserves to be a high priority in your life.

3. Do it. While Ditch. Dare. Do!, was being written, author, Deb Dib prepared a wins worksheet designed specifically for recording your wins. It’s a fillable PDF that you can add to every day. Download your worksheet and get busy on your real work.

Good luck to all of you!

5 Typography Tips for Every Presenter

Today, everyone is a typographer. If you have access to a keyboard and a basic software program, you have control over typography. For instance, if you construct email, write for a blog or build presentations, you have a type of control (pun intended) over your words and letters that your great grandfathers would envy. Be thankful. Typography used to only be an art form available to the ink-stained laborers of the early 19th century.

A lot has changed since the days of Gutenberg, but the sad reality is that even though today’s presenter has control over type, most don’t quite understand — much less utilize — it as an art form. It is one, and its power can be immense.
Moving forward, I want you to apply significance to typography just as you do with color and photo selection. Here are 5 basic tips to get you thinking within the right context:

1. Match Your Brand

For starters, if you have a brand style guide, stick to it. There are most likely 1-2 fonts that you must adhere to to keep brand consistency. If so, follow the rules. If not, take advantage of the opportunity to seek out a new font that is still visually engaging and in a similar font family.

2. Pick Two Fonts

I always recommend aiming for only two font styles. Why? One font style is too boring. Three font styles are too much. Consider two font styles as the Goldilocks approach. It’s just right. If you insist on using multiple fonts, three should be the absolute cap.

3. Go Big

A few years ago, Masayoshi Takahashi changed the presentation industry by rolling out a big text approach to presenting. Think 500 point size. Large font is all he utilized on his slides. It was go big or go home, and it’s a simple and easy design tactic that anyone can implement.

4. Be Bold

Certain points are always going to be more relevant than other items. For instance, let’s look at the phrase “Change the world.” Depending on your perspective, you may want to really emphasize the idea of “Change.” Utilizing the bold feature to create contrast with your message then becomes essential: “Change the world.” Even with something so simple like the phrase above in this blog post, adding contrast adds plenty of visual value.

5. Keep it Simple

At the end of the day, your font choices need to be easy to read. It’s that simple. If you can’t decipher a letter, then you can’t expect your audience to decipher it, much less comprehend your message, as well. Choose wisely.


Remember, typography is an art. You aren’t going to become a typography expert overnight but you can definitely start building some more engaging slides by understanding the rules.