Better late than never, I’ve found time to post my summary of the October 21 meeting of the NSA Pro-Track class. I usually post these summaries the weekend of the class, but did not have the time then, and here we are nearly a month later and nothing posted! Tempus fugit.

The class was treated to clear instructions on how to organize an office for professional speakers (or any home office workers) by Eve Abbott. Eve is not just a ‘clean up and be productive’ organizational mentor, her approach uses sophisticated analysis of personal styles, down to the level of brain chemistry, as detailed in her web site A Brain New Way To Work.

I took the test she distributed on CD and was told that you are strongly-left-hemisphere dominant, with a balanced preference for auditory and visual inputs, a productive combination of traits. .. You can organize details into a pattern or you can arrange them sequentially so that you have at hand at least two alternatives which dimensionalize your organization and thoroughness. What this meant in practical terms is that I could clear the decks and implement systems to control the flow of information, so that the items I need are within my ‘Starship Enterprise’ action zone reachable from my office chair. Beyond this lie the working zone and history zone where less time-critical information is stored.

Eve stated that each hour an office worker invests in organizing their workspace pays off in 3 hours of productive work. She encouraged us to adopt a triage approach and ask the right questions at the right time to get rid of clutter. Each pile of clutter is an unmade decision. All paperwork needs to be given the RAFT treatment: Read, Action, File or Toss.

Following class, I spent a hour and forty bucks at Office Depot and now have a useful vertical file by my monitor with clear multi-colored plastic document holders. Simple as it sounds, it works. I spent half of Sunday cleaning up piles of clutter and filled my green recycling bin with a few years worth of worthless paper. I fully intended to publish ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures of my office in the blog — but between cleaning everything up and now the clutter (mainly Halloween decorations that need to go back to the basement) has returned.

The afternoon was spent in a workshop with Pro-Track manager Michael Holland, who did a show and tell session on things that can go wrong with professional speaking engagements. Issues the class dealt with included:

• The lights failing
• Cell phones ringing
• Hecklers
• High heels breaking
• Food or drink spilling on you just before you speak

The one issue we missed was what to do if two naked Kazakhstan men run onstage. But then. That never happens, unless you are attending the National Mortgage Brokers Association Awards dinner when Borat hits town.

OK, so I have to ask, what’s the most unlikely or embarrassing thing that ever happened to you when you were presenting? And what did you do?

I’ll go first – I used to take 500mg doses of Niacin for my cholesterol and my colleagues at Sun Microsystems were used to seeing a very red-faced Ian around the office for the hour or so afterwards as the “niacin flush” worked its way through my system. No problem, really. Until the day I was asked to do a last-minute presentation to a visiting Japanese business delegation in the Executive Briefing Center only moments after I’d swallowed the tablets. I was perfectly OK for the first half of my talk, but then gradually flushed from pale pink to vivid, sweating, embarrassed, red. I just kept talking. A sensation not unlike having my trousers fall slowly to my knees while not being able to acknowledge or prevent it. If they’d have been American or British customers I probably would have tried to explain matters, but the cultural and language barriers left me thinking the best strategy was to ignore my plight and soldier on. In retrospect, perhaps I should have ‘fessed up.

Has anyone an interesting or cautionary tale to share in the comments area below?