Author: Joe Kissell

As I’ve traveled around the world giving presentations, I’ve seen Murphy’s Law in action, up close, many times. Much as I might prepare ahead of time, things still go wrong all the time. And every time something does go wrong, I add another item or two to my emergency toolkit, the better to be prepared for next time.

Here are some of the things that have ended up in that toolkit. If you have a big presentation—especially if it’s out of town, where you won’t have access to your usual resources—consider putting together a similar toolkit of your own.

Gadgets and software

First, let’s talk about the gadgets and software in your toolkit.

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Modern presentation apps like Keynote and PowerPoint still encourage you to think in terms of “slides”: discrete, isolated objects to be presented one after the other, as though we were still using those old slide projectors to show film-in-square-frames slides. Our audiences may even expect to receive printed or PDF copies of our slides, one tidy image per page.

But that metaphor is a relic of an earlier time. Technology has moved on, and you can create far more interesting and appealing presentations if you move beyond the idea of “slides” and adopt a more fluid, seamless approach.

The best-known tool for presentations-that-are-not-slides is Prezi (4.0 mice), which gives you a huge canvas on which you place individual elements; you then pan, zoom, and rotate the view to highlight specific items. It’s a neat effect, but I prefer to downplay animations and transitions, not to call extra attention to them.

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My wife and I recently welcomed our second child, and our older son has just turned four. When we tell other parents that we both work from home, their expressions predictably turn from envy to horror in a matter of seconds. On the one hand, yes, it’s wonderful that we get to spend so much time with the kids at this age. On the other hand, the work we do requires extended periods of uninterrupted concentration, and those little bundles of joy are nothing if not distracting. How do we pay adequate attention to both our preschool kids and our work?

I don’t pretend to have all the answers, because every situation (and every child) is different. But I can tell you a bit about what’s worked for us.

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When you’re collaborating on documents with other people, sharing a folder on a cloud-based storage system like Dropbox is convenient way to keep everyone’s copies of those docs updated automatically. But nothing in that system prevents two people from opening and changing a given document at the same time. That can lead to version conflicts and confusion.

You could avoid this problem—and make it easier to see who made which changes and when—with a formal version-control system. Teams of programmers working on a project often use tools like Apache Subversion (SVN), Concurrent Versions System (CVS), or Git to manage their files. These tools ensure that only one person can modify a file at once, let everyone know who’s working on a file at any moment, and keep a historical record of changes so that any earlier version can be recalled in the future.

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Apple’s iChat had a wonderful feature called iChat Theater—also present in the Mountain Lion version of Messages, just without the “iChat” in its name—that let you share photos, PDFs, or Keynote presentations during a video chat. I used it countless times to give virtual presentations: An audience watching on a projection screen in a remote location could see video of me alongside my Keynote presentation, and I could see video of the audience plus a miniature view of my presentation (and anything else on my screen, such as my email or a Web browser).

But then Theater disappeared in the Mavericks version of Messages.

In a recent Mac 911 column, Chris Breen suggested a couple of workarounds. I’d like to share a few more, and add my own take on one of Chris’s suggestions.

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[Editor’s Note: This article is an excerpt from Take Control of Apple Mail, available for download from TidBITS Publishing for $15. The 175-page ebook, which covers Mail for both Mavericks and iOS 7, goes well beyond searching Mail to provide essential setup, customization, usage, and troubleshooting advice, whether you use Gmail, iCloud, Exchange, or IMAP—or multiple accounts.]

OS X’s Spotlight search feature automatically indexes all the messages in Apple Mail for super-fast searching, and you can search for those messages either within Mail or using the system-wide Spotlight menu.

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The closets, shelves, and drawers in my office are full of old Macs and iPhones (as well as even older non-smartphones), keyboards, mice, trackballs, cables and adapters of every description, books about decades-old products, tchotchkes from a hundred trade shows and conferences, and other tech detritus. In fact, it’s not only tech products. Somehow I’ve accumulated several lifetimes’ worth of office supplies and numerous other objects I’ll just never use.

Junk itself is a comparatively minor problem. What bugs me is inefficiency. Unneeded (or seldom-needed) objects have a way of interposing themselves between me and the Useful Object I Need Right Now. So, I’m working to simplify my home office—not only by getting rid of old stuff but also by rearranging furniture and electronics to reduce time spent searching for and moving things instead of doing productive work.

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There are well over a million files on my Mac. Sure, a few hundred thousand of those are components of OS X itself or of the apps I’ve installed. But, still, the number of user-generated files I’ve accumulated over the years astonishes me.

Most of the time, those files just sit there minding their own business, bothering no one. But sometimes, say, when I do a Spotlight search for a document and thousands of potential matches pop up, I start thinking a bit of file-simplification is in order.

Now, in this context “simplify” could mean “delete”—but it doesn’t have to. I might need a certain old file only once in a span of several years, but that doesn’t make it safe to delete. Depending on the context, simplification might mean reorganizing files, creating archives, offloading files to an external disk, or other strategies. And, of course, it would be easy to get carried away with this sort of thing and spend endless days looking for every last way to optimize one’s files, but that’s sure to produce diminishing returns. Instead, I suggest concentrating on the easiest and most fruitful kinds of simplification.

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Every time I read about a new Mac or iOS app in a category I use, I think to myself, “Oh, cool. That could save me some time and effort.” I download the app and try it out, but more often than not, I quickly conclude that my previous solution was just as good, and leave the new app sitting unused. From then on, whenever I see the app, I feel a vague, low-level anxiety. But still I accumulate more apps, and the cycle repeats.

Now I’m on a mission to simplify my apps by choosing fewer, better tools; learning them well; and deleting the rest.

Reduce decision-making

If your email is completely under control—your Inbox is normally empty, filing new messages is a breeze, and you feel no anxiety at all about the number of messages you receive every day or the number you’ve stored over the years, you can stop reading this article now. For everyone else, I have a few suggestions to help simplify your email experience.

Consolidate your accounts

Most email clients, such as Apple’s Mail and Microsoft Outlook, can handle as many accounts as you throw at them, and of course it’s often necessary to keep work and personal accounts separate. But do you really need email accounts from iCloud, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, your ISP, and so on? You can simplify your email by picking just one as your go-to account and setting up all the other services to forward email to that primary address (so you don’t need to worry about sending everyone a change-of-address notice).

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I usually lose all enthusiasm for the shiny new habits of the new year by about January 4, giving me the rest of the year to feel like a failure. But I’m much more disciplined in work than in my personal life, so when it comes to my home business, I think I have a better chance for success. If you’re considering adopting (or shedding) a habit or two, let my seven resolutions be food for thought.

1. I will keep up the good work

I actually follow most of the advice I give in my books and articles—for example, I have excellent backups, I ditched an email provider (Gmail) that wasn’t meeting my needs for one that does, and I run a mostly paperless office. If you have doubts about your backups, are frustrated with your email, or feel overwhelmed with paper, resolving to fix those things in the new year might be a great idea. But even good habits can use a little nudge now and then. For example….

2. I will keep up with my scanning

My “Papers To Be Scanned” tray is perpetually full, as is my “Scanned Papers to Be Filed” tray. And some of the stuff I’ve already scanned needs to be sorted and named, because I was in too much of a hurry to do so at the time the paper came in. Scanning and filing doesn’t take long if I do it on a daily or even weekly basis, but letting papers accumulate for 6 months is another story.

3. I will be more active