TJ Walker argues that text-heavy slides force audiences to choose between reading and listening, destroying attention. One idea per slide, ideally visual. Test what people actually remember to know if your slides help or hurt.
Chapters
Ultimize. Before your next presentation, remove half your slides. Not tweak them, not improve them, just remove them. Because in most engineering presentations, the slides are not helping you communicate. They are competing with you, and usually they win. Engineers love slides. Slides feel safe. They feel complete. They feel like documentation. You can put everything on them: data, charts, bullet points, explanations. And it creates the illusion that you've done a thorough job. But here's the problem: your audience can't read and listen at the same time effectively, no matter how smart they are. When you put a dense slide on the screen, your audience has to make a choice. Do they read the slides or do they listen to you? Most will either read or ignore both and stare at their cell phone. And when they read, they stop listening to you. That means you've lost control of the communication. This is one of the biggest mistakes engineers make. They assume slides are supporting their message. In reality, the slides are often replacing it or distracting from it. Now let's take an engineering approach to this. What is the function of a slide? The function is not to display everything I know. The function is to make one idea more understandable and memorable. That's it. If a slide does not make your message clear, it should not exist. Now let's talk about what typically happens. Engineers create slides like this: full sentences, detailed explanations, complex charts, multiple ideas on one slide, and then they stand there and read or paraphrase what's already on the screen. From the audience's perspective, this is redundant. It's boring. They're reading, you're talking, and neither is reinforcing the other. And that's in the best-case scenario. Most of the time they're not even reading the slides. They're thinking, I should have stayed at home, or why didn't this person just email me the deck? It's just noise. So here's the shift. Your slides should be simple enough that your audience can process them instantly. Not in 30 seconds, not in 10 seconds, instantly. That usually means one idea per slide. Here, and you're going to think I'm crazy, you're going to think this is insane, I would recommend no text. Use images, a picture, a graph. When you take out text and you put images, people can instantly understand. They don't have to look at text, turn it into an abstraction, turn it into a word, and process it in their brain. I realize it's probably not done that way in your organization, but that is the most effective way to use slides, is to put an image, a picture, something where it's not text dependent. If your slides require an explanation to understand, it's too complex. Now, this is where engineers push back. They say, but I need to show the data. Well, sometimes you do, but most of the time you don't need to show it all at once. You can simplify one data point at a time. You can highlight, you can focus attention on what matters the most. For example, instead of showing an entire complex chart, you can show a simplified version. Highlight the key trend, explain what the audience should take away. Remember, your goal is not to display data. Your goal is to communicate meaning, and meaning comes from focus. Not volume. Now let's connect this to testing and evidence. How do you know if your slides are effective? Again, you don't guess, you test. After your presentation, ask someone, what do you remember from the slides and what slides do you remember? If the answer is, I remember there was a lot of information, you seem on top of things, you're a smart guy, that's a failure. If the answer is, I remember the key point from your second slide, and they're telling you exactly what was on the slide, That's success. You now have empirical evidence that that slide was effective. You can also observe behavior during the presentation. Are people seemingly reading ahead? Well, they're not going to do that if you don't put text up there. Are they ignoring you while you look at the screen? Are they confused by what's on the slide? That's data. It's valuable. And it tells you whether your slides are helping or hurting. Now let's take this further. Try this experiment. Deliver part of your presentation without slides. I don't mean fewer slides, I mean without any slides. Just you speaking clearly. Then deliver the same part with your current slides. Which version is easier to follow? Not for you, but for the audience. Which version keeps attention? Which version leads to understanding? You might be surprised because in many cases, removing slides actually improves communication. That's a powerful insight. It tells you that slides are not required. They are optional tools, and like any tool, they should be used only when they improve the outcome, not by default. Too often people feel, oh, I'm giving a presentation, I have to have 25 slides. No, you don't. You have to communicate important ideas. Don't lose focus of what the real mission is. Now let's define a simple rule you can use for the future. Every slide must answer this question: how does this make my message clearer and more memorable? If you can't answer that, remove the slide. Throw in the trash can. No exceptions. This is where discipline comes in. Because it's easy to add slides, it's harder to remove them. But removing slides is often what creates clarity. Less visual noise, more focus, more attention on what truly matters, and ultimately better results. Now let's tie this back to the engineering mindset. Your presentation is a system. Slides are just one component of that system. If that component is not improving the output, you modify it or you remove it. You don't keep it because it feels comfortable to you. Guess what? No one in your audience cares about what's comfortable for you. They only care about, is this person giving me something interesting and useful that I need to know right now? Keep the slides if they work. The only way to know if it works is to test it. So from now on, use fewer slides, simplify what you show, focus on one idea at a time, preferably in a visual, non-text way, and measure the results. Because when your slides support your message instead of competing with it, everything becomes easier for you and the audience. Your audience pays attention, your ideas are clearer, and your presentations become more effective. In the next episode, we're going to focus on one of the most important skills you can develop: how to explain complex ideas clearly without overwhelming your audience. You know, there's one thing I always find interesting. People will listen to a podcast like this, get ideas, maybe even feel a little motivated, and then just move on with their day. Nothing actually changes. And I get it. Information alone doesn't do it. Repetition does. That's actually why we built Ultimize. So if you're getting any value from this, just go to ultimize.com. That's spelled U-L-T-A-M-I-Z-E dot com. There's a free course waiting for you there. You can start with communication skills, but the whole idea is simple. Don't just hear something once, actually build it into your life. Again, it's free. Go to ultimize.com.
