Time Management for Effective Presentations

You're given an opportunity to speak. You're told you've got exactly 10 minutes or 20 minutes or 30 minutes. How can you keep from going over your allotted time? Because, let's face it, it's easy to just get swept up in things. You're enjoying it, you're getting a good reaction, but you notice it's two minutes till you're supposed to get off the stage, and you're only halfway done. Oh, no. Well, at that point, it's too late. Let's step back for a minute and, and really analyze what gets people into trouble in the first place when it comes to timing. You're told you've got 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes. Great. You know in advance how long you're supposed to be. The problem most people have is they start writing out a speech or they're writing out PowerPoint slide deck, and when they're practicing, they're doing it in their own head. They're reading the slides. They think they're sleep reading it slowly, but they read all the slides and hey, it only took five minutes. And you were told you've got five minutes. So you think, wow, this is great. I'm in good shape, piece of cake. But then you stand up to speak, you're talking, there's maybe a laugh, maybe a question, someone in the audience looks a little quizzical, and you maybe stop and give another example. So what takes five minutes to say in your head maybe might actually take 10 or even 15 minutes. In real life, when you are speaking it, all of us can read faster, think faster than we can speak. The other issue is you're not taking into account the pausing, especially with a larger audience. You need to pause after you've made a point. You need to give people a sense of, I'm finished here, now I'm transitioning over here. You may actually be taking a step or two, reflecting. That's not going to show up when you're timing yourself sitting in front of your laptop at your home office. But it takes time when you are delivering the presentation in real life, and it's essential time. You want spaces, you want pauses. Pausing when you speak is punctuation. I can write you a letter now and save space and be more efficient with paper. If I didn't use any periods or spaces between words or commas or paragraph breaks, but you'd look at it with all a bunch of letters and it wouldn't save time, it would be harder for you to process it. If you want to be more successful, then improve Your communication skills. The best way to do that. Smash the subscribe button right now. You need punctuation when you're reading. Well, your audience needs punctuation when you are speaking to them. And that punctuation comes in the form of pausing. You pause after you've made a major point. You pause when you've asked a rhetorical question. You pause when you've said something and people look a little confused. It's essential, but you're not going to know in advance if all you do is say, Well, I speak 160 words a minute and I have a thousand words here, so the math says it's all right. That is not the way to do it. The way to get a much better sense of. Of your timing is you need to practice it out loud. And if it's going to be a presentation where you're standing or moving around, then, yes, you need to actually stand up and move around. Now you can practice with your cell phone and you can put it on the other side of the room and of all of a sudden you're out of frame like this. That's okay. It's still going to give you a better sense of timing. You need to practice it out loud. The other thing you need to do, give yourself a little cushion. If you've been told you've got 20 minutes, don't prepare more than 15 minutes. And that's practicing it out loud. Because something could come up. There could be a question, there could be a confusion. There may be a great idea that pops into your head in the actual presentation where you give a second example or a second story to illustrate a key point. You want to give yourself the freedom to do that. TED Talks will give you 18 minutes. But some of the best TED talks ever have been 14 minutes. The most viewed TED Talk of all time on YouTube is 14 minutes long. No one's complaining. No one's putting in the comments. My goodness, you didn't give us the final four minutes. No, it was interest, therefore it didn't matter. Give yourself little cushion, because here's the thing about timing. You can be speaking really well. Great. Feel like the audience is loving you. But if you go over, you're going to annoy someone. The organizer of the event is going to be upset because now the lunch is messed up, or the next speaker is going to have to go short because they have to catch an airplane. The next speaker is going to be upset. So you cause all sorts of problems if you go over your allotted time. In many meeting situations, conferences, conventions, if you go a little bit under, typically nobody's upset. If you're a few minutes, it's proportional too. If you've been hired at a very high fee to give a 60 minute keynote and 30 minutes for Q and A. Yeah, if you finish after eight minutes, then they're going to feel disappointed. But if you've been asked to give a 60 minute keynote and time has not been allowed for and time has not been allotted for Q and A, and you finish it 50 minutes and now you take Q&A for 10 minutes, everybody is happy. If there's no question and answer time permitted or desired, and you've been given 10 minutes to speak and you finish at 8 minutes and 20 seconds, guess how many people are going to be upset with you? Absolutely nobody. So try to finish a little bit early. Be aware of it at all times. Now, doing all this, sometimes you can still lose track of time. That's why I would urge you have some timepiece available. Look at the room. If there's a clock in the back, make a note of when you started and stopped. If you have a watch that doesn't require you to do this, do that. You may want to actually put an alarm clock of sorts or some timepiece on a table that's not noticeable next to the computer or next to your glass of water. So you can be aware of time. You also may even want to have somebody in the audience let you know through hand signals. You got three minutes left, you got two minutes left. Wrap it up. That can be helpful. Figure out what works for you. But realize this speech may be the most important thing you do all day, maybe all week. It's important to you, but everybody else has a lot of other things going on. They've got a schedule, they've got agendas, they've got planes to catch, meetings to go to, lunches to go to. It's critically important that you stick to the time allotted to you for your presentation.