One-Sliders
I showed a colleague of mine one of my tricks for building slide decks faster. It's a divide and conquer approach I've been using a few years. I do what I call "one-sliders."
Whenever I build a deck, such as for milestone meetings, I create a set of single-slide decks. I name each slide appropriately (vision, scope, budget, ... etc.) I then compose the master deck from the slides.
Here's the benefits that might not be obvious:
- It's easy to jump to a particular slide without manipulating a heavy deck, which helps when I'm first building the deck.
- It encourages quick focused reviews with the right people (e.g. I can pair with our CFO on the budget slide without hunting through a deck)
- It encourages sharing with precision. I share the relevant slide vs. "see slide 32" in a 60 slide deck.
- I end up with a repository of reusable slide nuggets. I find myself drawing from my "one-slider" depot regularly
- Doing a slide at a time, encourages thinking in great slides. It's similar to thinking in great pages in a Wiki (a trick Ward taught me).
The biggest impact though is that now I find myself frequently sharing concise one-sliders, and getting points across faster and simpler than blobby mails.
