My Tools: PowerPoint – 14 hours and Word – 4 hours

It’s only a small sample of a week, but one of the statistics that I’ve found very interesting on my application usage has been the huge difference in time spent in PowerPoint (14 hours) compared to Word (4 hours).

That means that I am using PowerPoint for nearly 20% of all of my active application time.

Once upon a time my primary communication method was a document, I’d spend ages getting the words right, correct, and accurate. Today, I’m nearly always creating diagrams, and crafting a set of them together to build a story.

Some of this change is because my role has changed – I’m not working directly on projects most of the time, I’m trying to influence thinking, helping people to understand things.

The other reason the I’m not writing documents is that no one reads document anymore. I’ve tried writing documents to more fully explain my thinking, but it’s no use, people only want a document these days when a process mandates that they have one.

On the whole I actually think that this is a good thing, I’d much prefer that people focussed their efforts on understanding rather than on grammar (especially as mine is so bad). But there is also a real danger here, and that is the effect of the passage of time. Documents shouldn’t need any explanation, a presentation nearly always should. That’s fine when a presentation has only just been created, the author is available for questioning and they can still remember what they meant, but over time that is less and less likely.

The value of the presentation degrades much faster than the value of the document.

Therein lies my question: are we scrimping on the cost now, only to see the costs come flooding back later on? Or perhaps that is what we are hoping the mandated policy will fix?