Thoughts On Presenting & Design mike-pulsifer.org

Addition Through Subtraction

Craig Strachan has an excellent post on his site titled, "You will never fit everything in."  In it, he stresses the importance of limiting the content to what's appropriate for the audience and the time allotted.   You can have the greatest slides in the world, but if you have so much content that you have to either race through it all or have to skip through over some, you're hurting your message.

It all comes down to preparation.  The effectiveness of those 15, 20, 30, etc. minutes you're up in front of your audience all rides on your prep work.

Understand how much time you have. If you don't know how much time you'll be given, ask.  If you still don't know, and frankly, even if you do, plan accordingly.  Have a plan A, plan B, and plan C.  Even if you're budgetted 30 minutes, there's always the chance someone else could cut into your time due to their lack of planning.  If you all of a sudden have 15 fewer minutes to give your talk, if you planned for this possibility, then you should be able adjust your content.  If you're using slides, before you get up, set to "skip" those that you need to so the audience doesn't get the impression that you're skipping something important.

Understand your audience. If you're presenting to a bunch of sales reps, leave out the content useful for teachers if it's not relevant to your audience.  Cutting out irrelevant content saves time for relevant content and can help keep your audience engaged.  If you're telling them something irrelevant, they'll disengage and their minds will wander.  It's here where you need to remind yourself of the adage, "addition through subtraction," where taking something irrelevant away will actually add to your message.

Practice, practice, practice. There's no way to tell how long your talk will take if you don't practice.  You should do at least 3 full run-throughs with a timer.  Keynote has a great timer in the presenter view.  If it's too long, look for areas to cut, either in slides or your speech, without compromising your message.  Once you make the cuts, practice again at least 3 times more.  I'll put hours over a few days into practice for a 15 minute talk and every time it pays dividends.