SlideMagic Blog

Humans process information absorbed during the day in a good night’s sleep. Important things get put in long-term memory, details that are less important go to the “forget bin”. Stress and noise gets reduced. When we get up, we feel refreshed and ready to get going again.

Memory is a big issue in AI at the moment. A few months ago, it was about remembering your last 3 prompts (sentences). Today, these “context windows” can span novels, to the point where this memory actually starts to confuse the model. A technical solution: dream cycles where the AI model peruses its information, selectively forgets details, and stores important data for future reference.

When it comes to presentation design, it is important to give your thoughts rest as well. Coming back to a story line after a few days makes your realize what actually is the best way to communicate the message.

And a fresh pair of AI eyes can help as well. Clear the context of your model, or open an entirely different one, upload your draft and ask whether this is actually the best way to tell your story…

As AI gets more and more capable and I use it for more and more things in my daily workflow, it creates a new problem: waiting for AI. Most tasks now take 1-3 minutes for which you have to wait for the result. Most takes would have taken you much much more than that if you were to do them yourself, so a big productivity gain, but, 1-3 minutes is too short to go and do something else, so you wait, get distracted, break your flow, and find yourself getting back to what you were working on 30 minutes later. “Ah small mistake, let’s do fix that. Click. 1-3 minutes wait.

I have not found a solution yet, and am experimenting:

• Running lots of agents in parallel, so it is like a plate-on-stick catching game
• Running the tasks in parallel of an activity that is easy to interrupt (watching a tutorial video)
• Writing a quick blog post…
• Etc.

A new world

When quickly putting a draft presentation together, it is tempting to not spend any effort at all on design and layout. “We can always fix that later”.

I would argue the opposite. Make the draft look as good as the final product will be. It sets the entire mood for the project. Looking at messy / ugly charts is not a big motivation to do great work. Messy / ugly charts encourage people to add bullet point and too much text, because you can always remove it later.

The good news is that a simple chart with simple content does not take a lot of effort to design properly. Fix proportions, alignment and colors and everything looks great in a few clicks.

(Pro-tip: use SlideMagic for your draft documents)

…when you prompt it to generate your presentation, maybe you are on to something new! AI generators predict what to write based on information it ingested before.

Now what if your AI generator comes up with a brilliantly written pitch?

It can take months to get the results of your strategy project, or your business plan. And along with it, your pitch deck has evolved as well. You take it out for every meeting.

A refreshing approach: rewrite the pitch deck (not the business plan of course) from scratch for your next meeting. My guess is that it should only take you 3 hours, since you did all the work over the previous months. A fresh story line, and only charts to support your messages, rather than provide backup data. No risk, if it didn’t work you will always have your old one, but my predication is that that one will start to collect dust.

I find the world of marketing and branding agencies very confusing. You ask them what they do, and you get a description of a process that sounds and looks very similar to everyone else you ask the same question. But in practice, people are actually very specialized. Defining the personality of a brand, creating the competitive strategic positioning of a company, making the pitch deck, generating leads, designing ads, running online campaigns, designing logos, etc .etc.

The best strategy to find out what people do is to ask them to describe a project, and see where in this whole jungle they played a role, and most importantly, at what stage in this description see you light up the eyes of the person you are considering working with.

Scientists seem to agree that humans are not really able to multi-task. Checking your phone messages while driving, or replying to every email the second they pop up is not very healthy.

This got me thinking. The stereo types are as follows: the extravert manager proudly claims that the above rule is incorrect, she can easily maintain dozens of email, phone, and live conversations in parallel. The introvert coder thinks the above is absolutely true, the buzzing of the microwave in the background kills her concentration.

I think the manager is actually not multi-tasking that much, and the coder might do a bit of it. If you are a manager, your task is to juggle lots of people and keep everything moving. I would consider this as one task.

If you are coding, you might find yourself rewriting 10 different modules, updating a database, fixing the front end, all in one, all components are open in the editor and the system won’t work unless you fixed all of them. That’s a bit more than one task.

So, I think it all depends on what you all a task.

This is an interesting video in which a bass player (Cici) explains how she copes with memorizing dozens of (cover) songs that she has not heard before in a short period of time. The lessons here can be applied to any performance, including a presentation.

The key is the memory shortcut: compressing lots of information into something short and “catchy” that is much more easy to remember than the individual bits and pieces. Examples:

• Grouping individual notes into shapes on the fretboard of a bass guitar
• Inventing an unusual description for the sound of a song (‘the carnival song’)
• Quick reminders of where songs are unusual, i.e., a break in a completely different musical style
• Reminders that are critical for the performance and hard to cover up: i.e., the whole bands needs to stop exactly at the same time on bar 64, or your instrument is actually starting the song solo, without the musical reference of the band to help you along.

In computer programming (and math), things are stored in variables. A variable has a name and can point to pretty much anything. A numerical value, a user, another piece of code, a device, a map, an image library.

The variable is a little memory shortcut to access information. In the world of presentations, our brain works with variables as well. Visual symbols that are a shortcut to a fragment of a story.

Used in a bad way. After you have given a presentation dozens of times, the slides in your deck become ‘variables’. The page becomes a trigger for you to deliver a piece of the story. It does not really matter what the slide actually says. The audience who sees this for the first time however, misses this context.

Used in a good way. When brainstorming a story line, I often write down pieces of my store on stickers. Each sticker contains a fairly cryptic description. “The lazy point”. “Flipping is not possible”. Meaningless to anyone but me. For me however, it is a very condensed way of putting a label on a section of my story, and enables me to move things around to try out different story lines quickly.

I tried the above brainstorm a few times in a group: writing very simple text bullets in an email and move things around. The other members of the group missed the context, started editing the bullets into full sentences, discuss these, and before you know it, you have a 5 page document that is worse than the original you wanted to improve.

It is hard to communicate an idea for a new song without the help of the full band.

• When you play the basic idea on one instrument to someone else, that person misses the context that it is in your head: the result a few bland chords in an obvious sequence.
• The same can happen to you. You had that brilliant idea, but when you get back to your note book the next day, the scribbles sound like a few bland chords in an obvious sequence.

The same is true for your presentation. Your audience is missing the context that is in your head, and the slides / your story is the only thing they can rely on.