Sometimes my brain doesn’t work as well as I’d like it to. Some might say it’s because I’m getting older, but I prefer to think it’s because I was never that smart to start with. Either way, I try to trick people into believing otherwise by utilizing various tools to make up for my deficiencies. For example, I would probably forget every single thing I have to do without my calendar and Trello.

Recently, I found myself struggling with a new issue: I had two large projects starting up at the same time. They were sort of similar, and the assigned team members overlapped. All of it was brand new to me. While I was still getting my bearings, I kept mixing up the details of each project or mistaking who was on which team. It sucked.

I needed a simple way to keep it all straight: some sort of trigger to help me quickly switch gears  when the phone rang and I had to answer specific questions on the spot. My quick and dirty solution: a short Google Slides deck with key project info, bookmarked for easy access via web browser.

It includes everything I might need to know about the project, in a format I can access and flip through in about 10 seconds. The slides are:

1. cover slide with logo or other identifiable graphic, project title, client name and short summary
2. project team slide with photos, names and roles
3. key milestones slide on a pretty little timeline
4. a couple other slides for things like process steps or work buckets

They’re all just pulled from default Google templates, so if you have any use for this sort of thing, feel free to copy and edit. Here’s the link:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1pNau4rIidDOkRnx8L1eu17coW81X6zLgpEBJ_wnrRGQ/edit?usp=sharing