Public Speaking After Checking Emails

Recently I was thinking about my past and current experiences with speaking in front of people.  My first time, I ever spoke on my own was a bad experience.  I was speaking in front of a medium size crowd with the bright lights and everything, wait backtrack.  I was suppose to speak at a conference, and I thought I was going to talk about the topic but a friend said you should do a slideshow.  As my friend said that, I remembered that I left everything in my friends car and then my laptop died and I didn't have anything ready.  After I got up there, the speech was 2 mins long instead of a much longer speech because all I said was "I want on this bike trip with various people and then you can see all the details at this website....."  Now I know to never do that again, and push myself to be more prepared.

Besides that experience, I have actually had a good speaking times on various panels that were interesting.  My favourite was talking about the bike trip at a university in my city which I enjoyed hearing questions from people in the audience.  Actually a friend of mine, who was a grad student at the time, got up and asked "How do you get all of these students to be more active on any issue?"  This question still sticks with me to this day.

I actually feel that speaking in front of people is something that I want to do more of.  Most of the time, I don't think people will ask me but I have to offer that I am willing to do this.  I don't get scared of speaking in front of people anymore but I do have to improve eye contact.

How do you improve eye contact when speaking to people in different situations like one-on-ones or in meetings or even speaking to an audience?  Please leave comments with your thoughts.

Speaking in front of people is amazing but before I can do that I have to check emails.  Emails come in all the time but I seem to manage this well compared to other people.  Yet, I don't set times to do a detailed check of my emails which would be helpful.  Maybe making time everyday to check my email in detail would help out for sure.

There are so many emails some days that I get overwhelmed that is why, I open the email read this and leave the email in my inbox to rot there.  If there was a way to actually look at the email and do right away what was there that would be amazing. Maybe not all my email is important and need to cut down on what comes into my inbox but unsubscribing and filtering.  I know I can't check my email 24/7 but there has to be a better way to get everything in my emails done.

Is email over and if so, what do you use instead?  Let me know in the comments.