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Presentation Timing: 5 Tips to Stay On Time and Avoid Audience Wrath

Were you happy about it? Or were you mad that they now put you behind for your next appointment? Or did you leave before they wrapped up?

In this article, we examine the importance of finishing on time and give 5 tips for staying within your time constraints.

Is finishing your presentation on time important?

In most situations, yes!

Always assume that your audience is busy (because they are).

Always assume that could have chosen other places to be (because they could have).

Always assume that they have something planned immediately after you finish (because they usually do).

Audiences get uneasy if you are approaching your time limit and you aren’t wrapping up.

They start to consider walking out .
They start to get nervous thinking about their next appointment , and how they may be late.
They start wishing you’d wrap it up already.
Most importantly, they stop listening to you!

Not only do you lose credibility with your audience and risk offending them, but you also lose the opportunity to make a strong conclusion because they either aren’t listening or they aren’t in the room!

Is it better to end early, or right on time?

If it’s really bad to finish over time, then one might assume that you should always try to end well under your allowed time. However, that’s not always good either.

If you finish your presentation considerably under time (e.g. 20 minutes early in a presentation scheduled for one hour), your audience may feel cheated, particularly if they paid to listen to you speak. They may feel that you promised 60 minutes of value, but only delivered 40.

For this reason, one safe rule of thumb is to speak for between 90-100% of your allowed time . So, if your presentation is planned for 60 minutes, you should speak at least 54 (or 55 for a nice round number). This ensures that your audience doesn’t “feel cheated”, but also ensures that you don’t go over time.

There are all sorts of exceptions to the above rule of thumb, so use your judgement and do what makes sense in your situation.

5 Steps To Keep Your Presentation Within Time

It’s really not that hard to finish your presentation on time. Just follow these five simple steps:

#1 — Know Your Allowed Time

Have you ever heard a speaker walking away from a venue muttering: “I thought I had longer”?

This is the result of poor communication between the speaker and the event organizer. Both the speaker and the event organizer end up looking bad in this scenario.

Make sure you are always aware of how long you have to speak. Verify with the event organizer before the event.

#2 — Plan Your Content and Edit as Necessary

For many speakers, the problem is not knowing how much time the audience is giving them. The problem is being unreasonable with how much they can say within that allotted time.

Most people overestimate how much material they can adequately cover within a given time. They want to “share everything” and “leave nothing back”. On the other hand, the wise presenter develops strong self-awareness about how long it takes to effectively deliver their message.

When you are planning, also consider:

Q&A : Allow time for audience questions, either within your presentation or at the end.
Activities : Allow adequate time for any planning audience activities or exercises. One of my challenges is that I tend to underestimate how long it takes to explain an activity and “break into groups” before the exercise even starts.
Breaks : For longer presentations, budget time for breaks for stretching, bathroom visits, coffee, or meals. This all comes out of your allotted time. In a typical full-day (8-hour) training course, for example, you might only have 6 hours of instruction once you subtract out all of the breaks.

Cut mercilessly to make sure the material you intend to deliver can be delivered within your time constraints. It’s better to present the appropriate amount at a pace which the audience can absorb rather than whizzing through too much material so the audience grasps nothing.

#3 — Rehearse Effectively

Until you gain experience as a speaker, you may not be able to accurately gauge how much content fits within a given time. For example, how many pages would you write if delivering a 30 minute commencement address? How many case studies can you cover in a lunch-time seminar?

“ If you go over time while rehearsing, you’ve got to cut material. ”

The best way to measure how long it will take is to time yourself while you rehearse effectively:

Rehearse standing up and speaking out loud . Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you can just “whisper” your way through your slides while sitting in front of your computer. Your pace will be different while standing.
Speak to a test audience , even if all you can arrange is one person. This eliminates the tendency to “practice within yourself” as some speakers do while rehearsing. Just one audience member forces you to make eye contact and look for audience feedback. It also simulates a bit of the pressure you may feel with a real audience. You can also get valuable feedback by asking “How was my pace? Did I go too fast?”
Make it as close to the real thing as possible . If you’ll be using a presentation remote to advance your slides, then rehearse with one. If you’ll be moving around in the “real presentation”, then do so as you rehearse. If you can rehearse in the room where you’ll be presenting, do so. The more closely you can mimic the real thing, the better your time estimate will be.
Make it a dress rehearsal . If I’m planning to wear a suit when presenting, I like to rehearse in one. For me, the act of dressing up creates the same nervous energy and tends to give me more accurate timing.

Rehearsing in this way allows you to accurately time your presentation under close-to-real circumstances. If you go over time while rehearsing, you’ve got to cut material.

#4 — Start on Time

How many times have you seen a presenter ask for “just 5 more minutes” at the end of a one-hour presentation, despite having started ten minutes late?

Do everything in your power to start on time. Arrive early, sort out your technology, and make sure everything is set to go when your time starts. Don’t waste a moment.

Your exact start time isn’t always within your control. For example, I know of one company where “lunch-time seminars” always start at 12:15. If you are invited to speak in this forum, you’ve got to know that. A thorough discussion with the event organizer should reveal this.

#5 — Measure Your Progress and Adjust

For short speeches (say, under 15 minutes), you can probably just launch into it and hit your end time target within reason (assuming you have rehearsed it).

For longer presentations, however, you can use a more strategic approach:

As you rehearse your content, note how long it takes for each “block” of your presentation. (Get someone to time you if necessary.)
12:05 – Start presentation
12:15 – Introduction and case study introduced
12:30 – Case study and lessons learned complete
12:50 – Live demonstration complete
12:58 – Q&A complete. Applause.
Write down these targets and have them with you as you present, perhaps on a small notepad by your water. (I do it with red pen and big letters.)
As you reach the end of each “block”, check the clock . If you are running behind, you can adjust your pace. For example, if you are starting the live demonstration at 12:35, then you know you are 5 minutes behind, and you’ll have to cut planned material to “catch up.”
If necessary, recruit an assistant with a watch to help you monitor your intermediate targets.

Speaking over your allowed time is disrespectful and will annoy at least some people in your audience. It’s a privilege to have their attention, whether it’s for 5 minutes or 5 hours. Don’t abuse it! End on time — every time.

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We’ve all been there. The speaker speaks for far longer than anyone expects and as an audience member you just sit there thinking “when will this end?” I’ve seen it time after time at public speaking clubs in particular.

It’s worth reinforcing that when you are speaking in front of an audience, it will always take longer to cover the same material adequately. That extra time is necessary to let the message sink in with a real, live audience. Rehearsal time can be misleading, so don’t get caught out!

I would love to share this with clients. Your 5 minutes is not the same as mine, just make sure you finish on time. Great read!

this is great advise ur really smart dude keep doing you

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Presentation timing: 5 tips to avoid audience wrath http://t.co/Dw4Je0rz — Diane Dec 21st, 2012

recommend reading for presenters at conferences http://t.co/LfnlikwXp6 — @tweetsimon Jul 7th, 2014

@VMart speaks the truth! 5 tips to keep yourself on time and your audience happy. http://t.co/SWeQFQEcDE #AFS145 https://t.co/bxbn7wDSjQ — @pseanmc Aug 19th, 2015

.@6minutes Andrew! I just read your article on speech timing, so great! Also giving it to my students to read ~ https://t.co/JzheERLxNz — @JacksonHoleRose Oct 25th, 2015

Presentation Timing: 5 Tips to Stay On Time and Avoid Audience Wrath https://t.co/qjXmwcjwZ4 by @6minutes — Sleiman Skaf (@SleimanSkaf) Apr 20th, 2016

#TuesdayTips Good tips by @6minutes about keeping your presentation within the allotted time. https://t.co/Rk2GtzReRv — PitchVantage (@pitchvantage) Jul 26th, 2016

There is nothing worse than when speakers go on and on and on . . . https://t.co/XZVnTmNvHO — @speakers4change Oct 5th, 2016

#DMCIT Might be of interest for the upcoming presentations. https://t.co/oeGhqqc5F8 — @Zeet66 Nov 1st, 2016

Of course, you don’t want to go way under time, but, in my opinion, it’s much better than going over time. I like… https://t.co/4FPFvPxB6R — @justineldees Oct 28th, 2018

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Presentation Tips

How to Manage Your Time During a Presentation

You’ve been offered a 60-minute timeslot to present to a group of stakeholders but have 90 minutes of content you want to cover — or worse yet, only 30 minutes. How do you make your message resonate with your audience while not feeling rushed or pressed for time? We offer our best tips for managing your time during a presentation while keeping your audience engaged and talking points heard.

Rehearse and then rehearse again

At a minimum, you should be practicing your presentation between five and 10 times. The goal is not to repeat the same dialogue word for word each time but rather find ways to say something differently or more succinctly each time. You’ll want to not only figure out how long each slide will take to cover, but also when and where to pivot if things don’t go as planned. Stick to the rule of thirds: Spend one-third of your time planning, one-third designing, and one-third rehearsing.

Be ready to cut it short

Life happens, especially when others are in control. Maybe participants are late getting back from a session break, the presenter before you runs long, or the inevitable technical issue happens. If you outline your presentation with key points and sub-points, you should be able to skip along more quickly by only covering the key points when short on time. What’s more, it’s better to engage your audience and encourage questions throughout than finish the presentation. By coming across as the expert in the room, you open the door to scheduling time at a later date with those who want to discuss points not covered during the allotted time.

Arrive early

The best way to avoid the unavoidable is to show up early to your designated location so setup doesn’t factor into your presentation time, and if it doesn’t take that long, give that time to the next presenter for their setup. Simply put, if you’re arriving or finishing on time, you’re running late. Plus, the added bonus of arriving early is you get to know your audience a little bit and find out what’s at the top of their mind. These are golden moments you can integrate into your presentation.

Be realistic

During rehearsal, you’ll quickly get a sense if your presentation is too long or too short. Be realistic about your personal speaking habits. Do you tend to speed up when you’re actually presenting? Do you pause a lot? Do you know if this audience loves to ask questions? Consider those real-world situations as you try to edit your deck. Some extra tips: Don’t linger on a slide for too long; make your point and move on to keep your energy high. Along the same lines, don’t try and cram everything you know into the presentation. Stick to your key points and anecdotes to make sure people are really absorbing the content. Think quality, not quantity.

Never count on a clock being in the room to manage your time in the moment of your presentation. Have your phone (silenced, of course) on the podium ready to glance at, appoint someone in the back of the room to give you cues when you are running out of time, or even discretely glance at your watch while taking a sip of water. Even though you’ve rehearsed enough to know how the time will pan out, taking an obvious break to check the time can be a big distraction.

What time constraints do you run into when making a presentation?

Mastering the Clock: 9 Time Management Tips for your Presentations

Guests and fish may stink after 3 days, but presentations start to stink already when they go over by more than 1 minute. If you want to be an impactful speaker and leave your audience wanting to hear more from you, you must make them feel appreciated. The most fundamental form of this is respecting the time frame they are expecting. These 9 time management tips will help you be a better speaker.

1. Know your time limit

This may seem obvious, but you need to know how much time you have and the absolute hard limit in case something goes wrong. Don’t accept the “around X minutes” as an answer. You need to work and plan your presentation to an exact period of time.

On the day of the presentation, please make sure to confirm with the organizer in case there are some schedule changes. If there was, you should also inform your audience of such changes. Be respectful.

2. Practice with a timer or Virtual Orator time limit setting on

Managing the presentation time is as vital as any other part of rehearsals. You need to practice it as well.

You can use a timer, a clock, or, of course, Virtual Orator. We have a couple of features that are of great help in your training.

3. Take time to prepare your message

Prepare your message carefully and as clearly as you can, and stick to it. Most of the audience will be sitting there looking at you blankly. This scares many speakers, and they start to improvise. They tend to rearrange the speech in the heat of the moment, leading to extra time spent.

Avoid this mistake by taking the time to prepare a great message. Just go to the presentation with the certainty that you have a good message. Then, deliver it in the best way possible. Keep it concise and organized.

4. Schedule ahead

When preparing a speech, you must prepare for everything, even failure. After preparing your message, divide it into introduction, 3 ideas (avoid more than 3), Q&A, and conclusion. Decide how much time you intend to spare with each of them, which helps you keep track of time.

It is tough to know if 30 minutes have passed, but you can have a more accurate idea of if 3 or 5 minutes have passed. By breaking your presentation into these parts you can maintain a feel for your timing.

Virtual Orator keeps track of how much time you spent on each slide, while you practice. This is a good way to have an idea on how much time has passed when you reach slide number X and were you can skip if you are going long.

5. Plan to cut!

Having an impeccable schedule of what you will say and for how long is amazing work, but things happen. There are interruptions or sudden interest in specific information or lots of questions. So many things can happen, and they are all normal, respectable, and not to fear – IF you have a plan in advance on what you can cut.

It is essential to listen to the audience and know what they want to hear, but you know there are essential points that can’t be left out. So plan ahead what’s vital, what can be cut in case of need, and how to do it smoothly (no one needs to know). If you have enough time, you can prepare different versions, but be sure to rehearse them all.

Again, don’t try to rearrange your speech or improve your message at the heat of the moment. Prepare, rehearse and make as many versions of your speech as you need to go on that stage confident and ready for everything.

6. Provide a detailed hand out

No matter how good you are, your audience will not memorize more than 3 or 4 main ideas. So you must focus on what’s more important and forget the details. Yet, this doesn’t mean that your audience can’t have them.

Think of your job as a speaker as a way to ignite that spark of curiosity in them. Prepare a detailed pdf or share a QR code that links to all the information somewhere online. All details, graphics and stats – everything you’d like to say to them, you can put into the hand out. Give it to them so they can read and study at their own speed in the comfort of their homes or office.

This way, you can focus on what it’s crucial and still give them all information. Trying to “say everything” is one of the main reasons speakers can’t keep up with the time.

8. Track your time

This is a tricky one. Looking at your watch constantly may give a bad impression, but you need to have an idea of how much time you have left. Some rooms have large clocks on the wall, making it easier to look without being noticed, but this is not always the case.

If you’re in this situation, try to lay the watch on the table or lectern. If you take this choice, rehearse this way. You can also flip the clock to the inside of your wrist, and with enough practice, you can peek at it more discretely than usual.

9. Meet them!

Meeting your audience and giving them time to talk to you and ask questions is good to help you keep the actual presentation on track.

So, are there a lot of questions? That’s great. It shows they felt your presentation was interesting and want to know more. Let them know the time is over, and make yourself available to talk after the event. It can be in person, or you can give them an email or even a phone number, if you’re comfortable with it. Make yourself approachable and make them feel comfortable to come to you.

The time is YOUR problem, not theirs.

Your audience signs up for a specific time, and you must respect it. The speaker’s job is to prepare and anticipate any issue that could disrupt the presentation and make them lose track of time.

Follow these tips to help you in this challenging task, and avoid mentioning time to your audience. You want them to be delighted with your presentation, not to be thinking about if it will be too long.

Cátia Isabel Silva

Cátia is a psychologist who is passionate about helping children develop and train social skills.

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Project Management

Mastering time constraints in a project: strategies, examples, and tools.

February 13, 2024

A constraint is a limitation, a set of boundaries within which you must work. Most people would see constraints as a negative, curbing what you can achieve.

Within project management, the opposite can be true. Imagine if you had infinite time to develop a feature. You’d never complete it!

Without constraints on the project scope , you’ll be pushed and pulled in all directions, significantly affecting your focus. Without resource constraints , your workflows might not be optimized for efficiency or productivity.

Project constraints enable efficiency and effectiveness, helping teams deliver software in small increments. Various types of constraints have different impacts on project outcomes. Let’s look at them one by one.

Scope constraint

Cost constraint, time constraint, what are time constraints, 1. project planning, 2. task prioritization, 3. realistic time estimation, 4. time tracking, 5. regular progress monitoring, 6. risk identification and mitigation, 7. streamlined communication, 8. agile project management, 9. managing meetings, 10. continuous improvement.

The Triple Constraints of Project Management

A typical project can face three kinds of constraints: Time, cost, and scope. These are commonly known as triple constraints. They are also known as the project management triangle, iron triangle, or project triangle.

The scope refers to a product’s features or functions that the team has agreed to deliver or the tasks the project team has agreed to complete.

It outlines what needs to be done and at what quality. The project scope typically also determines the time and cost.

A good project scope gives development teams the clarity and freedom to build software. A bad one allows scope creep and throws the team off track.

Cost constraint is the budget, placing limitations on financial resources. This can include several things. For instance, an agile software development team can have constraints on the following project costs.

Team salaries
Equipment like laptops, servers, etc.
Allowances and travel expenses
Any software or automation tools needed for project completion

Effective cost constraints ensure return on investment (ROI) and business outcomes. A bad one leaves everyone demotivated and restrained.

The boundaries of time applicable to a project. In other words, deadlines. The time constraint is applied in the form of deadlines for each task, milestone, and the entire project.

A reasonable time constraint allows the team to build good products that meet all the acceptance criteria. An unreasonable time constraint or a tight deadline will force the team to cut corners and build a low-quality product, piling up technical debt.

Of the trifecta of constraints that keep a project manager up at night, today, we focus on time constraints. We see why they’re important and what you can do to avoid them from derailing your project.

Time constraints are the limitations of duration placed on you through the course project. By when you should finish the project, when you should push features to production, how many person-hours you can spend on a feature, and so on.

Time constraints are often visualized as a schedule. For example, you would schedule a project with deadlines for the planning phase, development, testing, final review, production push, and hand-off.

Any delay in one of the phases may have a snowball effect, pushing the entire project down a few days/weeks. These delays create unnecessary and artificial constraints on project delivery.

A project manager strives to avoid artificial constraints that arise in the middle of the project. Here are some ways to do that.

10 Strategies to Avoid Time Constraints

Avoiding time constraints is not a one-off activity but a continuous process. Project teams set structures and systems to avoid creating pressure on themselves. Some of the most effective ones use a project management tool like ClickUp. Here’s how.

A robust plan avoids half the constraints. Create a comprehensive project plan outlining the tasks, deliverables, and deadlines. Use the ClickUp Calendar view to see how your tasks map.

Pay special attention to dependencies. If you have a task that depends on another, pushing the latter might derail the former. Gantt chart view can assist in tracking overlapping tasks and dependencies .

Use this project stage to evaluate the financial resources needed to complete in time.

First time planning a project? Here are some excellent project planning templates to get you started on the right foot.

There is a natural limit to how much work you can get done within a specified period. Prioritizing the right tasks is vital for effective time management.

If you stack too much, you’ll miss deadlines. If you schedule too little, you might have unutilized resources, which is a waste of time. So, prioritize and schedule to optimize outcomes.

Use a priority list to guide your decisions. Try resource leveling , allocating more resources for complex tasks, and letting the team stay on track.

A project schedule is created based on how much time team members think will be needed to complete each task. This process, called time estimation, is a critical part of project time management .

Project managers and team members typically base their project forecasting on past performance. If GDPR compliance took 20 hours the last time, it’s likely to take the same now.

However, estimates are just likely guesses. To ensure your estimates are as accurate as possible, compare them to actuals. ClickUp’s time estimate and time tracking features are designed for this very purpose.

Clock hours for every task on your project timeline. There are several time management apps that will allow you to do this.

ClickUp’s time-tracking is built into the project management platform, allowing you to start and stop a timer or add manual times for every task you’re working on. Use this information to make your estimates more accurate.

Over time, your ability to estimate and plan will strengthen, reducing time constraints.

If you’re putting together a new team or are newly adopting ClickUp, here are ten time management templates to help you leverage time tracking to avoid future constraints.

If you switch on a project and let it run unattended, you will likely be surprised when the tasks aren’t done on time. So, managing time constraints needs regular monitoring.

Use any free Gantt chart software to track if the timelines are as planned. Customize the ClickUp Dashboards to see the reports you need to track your progress. Use the burn-up and burn-down charts to know how the project might go. Identify delays and make alternate arrangements.

What is the probability of you not meeting the deadline? What are the potential reasons for this?

Answering these two questions will help you identify the risks you face and gauge their impact on the project. These risks could be financial, operational, or even behavioral. Its impact might be anything from a couple of days’ delay to a complete inability to deliver the project.

Before you begin the project, gather the team for a discussion of risks. Identify and mitigate these risks to ensure your time constraints are not exacerbated.

What your team members don’t know, they can’t do. For example, imagine a situation where the acceptance criteria for a specific feature isn’t communicated clearly. The developer might think they delivered the feature, while the quality analyst might disagree. They would send the feature back to the developer, adding unnecessary rework time.

Avoid this by streamlining all project communication.

Document meeting notes, requirements, and other conversations on ClickUp Docs
Write detailed descriptions for each feature/user story within the task
Allow team members to clarify anything they need contextually in the comments section of the task
Add checklists/action items to ensure the acceptance criteria for each feature are always handy
In addition to those who are working on the features, add ‘watchers’ to ClickUp tasks so they can intervene, if necessary

Sometimes, the project doesn’t go as planned. The business stakeholder might bring in changes in the requirements. Team members might fall sick and need extended days off. Organizations might run short of cash. Things happen. As a result, you might inevitably face time constraints.

Agile project management is designed to meet precisely such eventualities. Agile project managers are expected to foresee potential problems and make contingency plans. Or, at the least, they must alert the leadership and manage expectations.

“This could have been an email” is an internet meme for good reason. One of the biggest time sucks for the development team is meetings, many of them unnecessary and ineffective.

To consistently prevent unforeseen time constraints, manage meetings better. Review your time management tools to understand how much time goes into meetings. Based on that, optimize your processes.

Conduct meetings only for activities that require active discussion. Timebox them and push towards action items. Document key insights and decisions so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel in the next meeting.

For everything else, use a good collaboration tool. The comments within ClickUp tasks enable nested conversations. ClickUp’s chat view allows you to see all messages in one place and take action from there.

Agile teams are big on continuous improvement, with good reason. A continuously improving team can deliver higher efficiency and value in the long run. For instance, you’ve optimized the containerization process for each feature through continuous improvement.

You can then automate the entire or parts of it, saving even more time and effort. This is a crucial way to avoid time constraints sustainably.

Conquer Your Project Constraints with ClickUp

Constraints are inevitable in every project. We would go as far as to argue that constraints are necessary.

However, unexpected and unreasonable constraints can derail the project entirely. Good project management should prevent that. ClickUp is designed with this in mind.

With ClickUp, you can follow best practices to avoid time constraints. ClickUp tasks, sub-tasks, and checklists ensure clarity of requirements. Calendar and Gantt chart views enable a bird’s eye view of ongoing work.

The ClickUp Dashboard offers visibility into project progress. With all the resources you need, you’re ready to conquer your project constraints with ClickUp. Try ClickUp now for free .

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Manage Your Presentation Time Efficiently With These Pro Tips

Public speaking

Having a time restriction for your presentation delivery is a common feature of most public speaking engagements or business events. You are usually allotted a time for speaking and a time for questions or an overall time slot for both. Keeping to this presentation time shows respect for your audience and ensures that you deliver an organized presentation that transmits a message. It’s also a sign of respect to the other speakers that come after you.

After a number of presentations, you have probably had instances of finishing earlier than expected or running over time, and that’s only natural. As you gain more experience, you get a better feeling of how to prepare your presentation better for the allotted time and how to deliver it most efficiently.

However, giving a good talk and staying on time is a coachable skill. With our team’s experience and our clients’ accounts, we’ve learned some essential elements you can keep in sight as a presenter.

Here are some tips to help you keep to time in your presentation delivery:

1. Frame your content

When planning your presentation, be realistic about what can be achieved in the allocated time. You cannot communicate the same amount of information in a presentation that you can in a report or a white paper.

Try to conceive the presentation more like a story than a dry document. People are wired to listen to stories, and metaphors. This type of narrative structures work best to engage people. They’re also easier to time block.

If you decide to frame the presentation as a story, the biggest decisions are figuring out where to start and where to end. One of the most common error in designing presentations is that they try to cover too much ground. If you try to cram in everything you know, you won’t have time to include key details, your talk will lack clarity and you’ll probably run overtime.

Also read: 5 Pro Tips For Giving Better Presentations

Organize your presentation starting from a few key ideas. Include specific case studies and examples. You might be tempted to take a broader approach to them but the more you focus your ideas and go deeper into the ones you’ve chosen, the more clear and easy to organize your presentation will be.

2. Build a layered presentation

Once you have a foundation to your presentation with the key story elements and your main ideas, you can take each section and expand it. This way, you’ll be able to give the same presentation in a longer time frame or in a shorter one, depending on the time you have.

For example, if you’re creating a presentation on Digital Marketing Trends, you can organize it to have an Introductory section, 5 Main trends, each with its own section, and a Conclusion. Every section can have 2-3 fundamental slides that can make a short version of your presentation. You can also choose to include 2-3 more slides per each section, with details, sub-trends or case studies, that can be included in the longer version of your presentation.

This way you can use the same document in two different events, with two different presentation time requirements.

3. Practice it several times

Even the most experienced presenter knows the importance of practicing your presentation. And not once, but several times. Even though you have created the content, unless you spend the necessary time speaking it out loud, to include details or body language elements and even audience interactions, you won’t know how long the presentation takes to deliver. You want to master it before presenting it to others, not only to fit in the allotted time but also to exude confidence and connect with the audience.

We’ve all heard of at least one presenter who got stuck or who didn’t know what slide was next. That’s a major no-no. Here are some things you need to time box when planning your presentation delivery:

Getting settled in front of your audience in order to prepare your visual aids, notes etc. before you start talking;Distributing handouts at the start/during/end of your talk;Developing points in more detail if it appears that your audience hasn’t understood an area of your talk;Accommodating any slight deviations from your script that you might make ‘off the cuff’;Responding to questions whilst you’re speaking and after you’ve finished;Working with your visual aids (change slides, annotate images etc.);Accommodating any pauses whilst you review your notes / allow your audience time to think between main points.

Practice it in front of colleagues or friends. Try to replicate the actual delivery as closely as possible, don’t just read it several times or else you might not have a clear view of how much time it actually takes. It will also give you the chance to receive some constructive feedback.

4. Have someone to keep the time

We each have our own awareness of the passing of time but it’s usually not the same for everyone. Our perception of time is alo influenced by the specific situation we’re in at a certain moment. If you’re stressed, time might seem to slow down, whereas if you’re relaxed and engaged in a topic, you can easily think you have more time to present your ideas when, in fact, you don’t.

Also read: Use These Presentation Apps To Rehearse Anywhere

Have someone in the organizing team of the event or someone on your team hold up a sign every 15 min or so to let you know how much time you have left. You can also use a regular clock or an app that you put in front of you. If you realize you’ll soon be running out of time, pause for a moment to review what you can realistically achieve in the last moments, without rushing forcibly through the rest of the content.

Make sure you also plan for some spare time. Unexpected delays in the beginning or unforeseen audience interactions might take some of the time you’ve budgeted for your actual delivery.

The single most important thing to remember is that, in time, you’ll develop your own rhythm. Which is both a good thing and a bad one if you don’t adapt. If you’re still building up the experience, it’s a good thing; you’ll soon become more aware of how much time you need both to prepare and to deliver your presentation.

If you’re a seasoned public speaker, you might think you know all of this already. But it’s important that you always try new things and adapt to the ever changing world of presentations and public speaking. We now have a multitude of tools, apps and different types of events that might still catch you unprepared if you skip some of the steps we’ve mentioned today. You know what they say: never stop learning.

If you’re looking to step up your public speaking game, check out these 10 easy steps to becoming a keynote speaker!

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How to keep to time during your presentation

by Olivia Mitchell | 33 comments

Photo credit: zoutedrop

Do you regularly go over time when you’re delivering a presentation? If a time limit has been set for your presentation, then it’s your responsibility to finish it within that time. Consider it as part of the contract between you and your audience.

Here are some tips to help you keep to time:

1. Decide on your “talking time”

You can’t keep to time unless you know beforehand how long you should be talking. Your “talking time” is different than the total time you’ve been given for your presentation for two reasons:

You need to allow time for questions. This may be decided by the meeting organizer. If not, as a rule of thumb I would allow 20-25% of your presentation time for questions.
Generally, live presentations take longer than the rehearsal. This is because of a combination of factors. You might start a couple of minutes late, you might take longer to make a point, and there may be other interruptions that delay you.

So if your presentation time is one hour, your talking time will be 40 minutes (15 minutes for questions and 5 minutes for interruptions and delays).

2. Find out how long it takes to deliver your material

This is a prerequisite to being able to keep to time. If you don’t know long your talk takes how can you hope to meet the time limit. Many presenters are very bad at judging how long it will take to deliver something. Seriously bad. On our courses, we ask participants to prepare a five minute talk. One time, a participant talked for 23 minutes! When we asked how long it was she thought that she had been talking for about seven minutes.

Time yourself early on in your planning process. This will save you time and agony. If you leave timing your presentation till the end of your planning process you’re likely to find that you’ve prepared too much material which will mean you have to edit your presentation . And editing is can be agonizing when you’ve grown attached to your material.

3. Write a timed schedule for your presentation

When you do a final rehearsal , note down the time that each segment takes and then take that information to prepare a timed schedule. So say your presentation started at 3pm your schedule would look like this:

3 pm Opening 3.05 Part 1 3.15 Part 2 3.25 Part 3 3.35 Closing 3.40 Stop talking

That means that during the live presentation, you’ll be able to easily tell whether you’re keeping to time. Note that it’s not enough to know that each part takes 10 minutes. In the presentation itself you won’t have the head space available to calculate whether you’re ahead or behind.

4. Write assertions so that you don’t waffle

Waffling is one of the things that can make a live presentation go longer than the rehearsal. Here’s what can happen: you make your point but the audience looks blank. So you elaborate on it some more, and then some more… and before you know it you’re waffling. The antidote to this is proper planning. During you’re planning, write each point as a full sentence (not a bullet-point) which expresses what you want to get across. You may later reduce this to a keyword or phrase in your notes but you’ll have done the hard thinking required. It’s much better to do your thinking before, rather than during, the presentation. For more on this see How to avoid waffling .

5. Have a clock or timekeeper

You can’t manage your time unless you can see the time. And you can’t rely on every meeting or conference room having a clock. Have a small, but easily readable, travel clock that you can put on the lectern or even in front of you on the stage. Make sure you can read it at a distance without your glasses on. There are remotes that also have a countdown timer and that will buzz you at 5 minutes and 2 minutes before the end of your presentation.

6. Start on time

Many presentations go over time simply because they started late. Lisa Braithwaite recently wrote about this issue in her post: You never have as much time as you want . Often that’s because the presenter or meeting organizer has decided to wait for late-comers. Like Lisa, if I’m in control then I’ll start on time. I don’t see why people who have made the effort to be on time should be penalized by having to wait for people who are late.

You may be concerned that people who are late will miss out on crucial information. So don’t start with crucial material. Instead open with a relevant and engaging story which leads into your first main point. The stragglers will come in while you’re telling your story.

7. Be ready to adapt

Despite all your advance preparations you may still run out of time. The solution is not simply to talk faster! Work out ahead of time what segment you will drop if this should happen. Make a note of the first slide number after the dropped segment. By keying in the number of that slide and then pressing ‘Enter’ you will jump straight to that slide. This is much more professional than clicking through your slides. Your audience need never know that you had to edit on the fly.

Go well with keeping to time in your next presentation! If you have any other tips that have helped you keep to time share them in the comments.

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33 Comments

Excellent post as always. I am going to read further what you’ve written about assertions and waffling (I love these descriptive words, by the way). I’m curious: do you always speak with notes, and do you recommend this? When I do a presentation supported with Keynote or PPT slides, I don’t use notes. I figure if I know my material well, I don’t need them. So far, this method has served me well. (However, I do print out 6 slides per page with the slide numbers, in case I need to flip back to a particular slide, using the method you’ve described.)

I just made your post this week’s compulsory reading for my students 🙂

What I like to do to keep a check on myself is printing out my slide thumbnails all on one page. I make a screenshot from the lightbox view in Keynote or slider sorter view in PPT (which keeps the slide numbers) and then I mark certain slides with the anticipated time in large and friendly red numbers: 10:45 hs. 11:15 hs

As you go along, check real time vs. planned time.

This works really well with longer talks or workshops.

After the talk I can immediately make any corrections necessary and see where I planned poorly or where I can tighten things a bit. It is also a great help for »next time.«

With shorter talks keep a large *analog* antique pocket watch nearby. It is like a large checkered handkerchief: it is so obvious is does not bother anyone. I find I still understand analog watch faces faster than the timer in presenter’s view.

Putting your anticipated times on your screenshot printout is a great idea.

I can relate to your preference for the analog watch. Delivering a presentation is such a full-on activity that everything else should be super-easy for you.

Thanks for your appreciation. I do always have notes within reach. I don’t normally look at them, but every so often I’ll have a mind blank where I go to myself “was there another point I wanted to make here.”. I’ll stop talking, look at my notes, find the point I wanted to make, look up again, find someone to talk to and start talking. I also do what you do with the printout of my slides. I find this useful because it means I can also see what slide is coming next and introduce it, rather than simply clicking and then talking. More about this here . Olivia

I can see how it would be useful to add the notes, in case of brain freeze!

Also, I usually do put time stamps on the slide printouts, so I know how I’m doing for time at major junctures of the presentation (example: when I’m playing an audio clip — so I can check the time while the audience watches). I usually just take off my watch and put it somewhere where I can see it, when there’s no clock in the room.

Great post. Going over the allotted time is annoying to the audience, the organisers and other speakers. I have found for me, if I plan to leave some time slack in my presentation it helps in keeping to time , i.e. if I have 30 minute slot I plan to deliver a 25 minute speech etc. It helps to keep me on time. If I finish early the time can always be utilised – a longer break, questions etc.

Yes, nobody ever minds a presentation ending early!

Good advice, as always – and knowing what to cut in advance is absolutely critical!

You mention a way of skipping slides – for people using Keynote there’s a better way, don’t forget. The menu option allows you to see different slides on your laptop without them showing on your screen and deciding where to go next – if you want to. That way you can edit on the fly with even more dignity and (importantly) the transitions are protected in a way that they’re sometimes not if you do ‘jumping’ in PowerPoint.

I get that Keynote is better in every respect!

I keep using Powerpoint to be the same as 99.98% of my clients.

Thanks for this thorough discussion of staying on time, Olivia! And thanks for the link to my recent post.

My suggestion for keeping track of the time is to use a regular kitchen countdown timer. Because of this: “…you won’t have the head space available to calculate whether you’re ahead or behind…” I find it harder to keep track of my time when looking at a clock, especially if we’ve started late. If I have a countdown timer, I know exactly how much time is left without having to do “clock subtraction” on the fly.

But I do also like to use approximate clock times on my notes, as you mentioned in #3. It does give a general idea of where I should be at a given time.

…..Hi Lisa… at risk of sounding like a stuck record about this… 🙂 “Get a Mac”. Keynote has this kind of function built in!

PS: Do you think Mr Jobs would give me commission? 😉

Haha Simon! Yes, you should get a commission for that.

That’s a great idea if you want to stand in front of your computer the whole time. My timer is usually on a table where I’m also keeping my props, handouts, water, etc., because who knows where the laptop is going to end up!

Good point about the laptop not always being in front of you. I make sure mine is. I take a 50M VGA cable with me in case the event organisers want the laptop to be somewhere near their projector – that way I can pretty much ensure having enough cable to keep everyone happy! 🙂

Mind you, 50M VGA cable isn’t a light thing to carry!

You Apple fanboy :-).

Good point about the countdown time being easier. Given Anke’s point it’s all about finding out what works best for you in the heat of the presentation.

great post! Two comments: 1) 25% for interaction in my opinion is no longer sufficiant. Attendants nowadays want to be involved and strive for a shared outcome, so interaction is key. I would suggest to take at least 50%. The real great speakers shorten their story to the lenght of a teaser and are willing to rely on the fact, that they will be able to deliver the rest of their content in response to questions and discussion. 2) take into account that when you try your speech at home, you might talk faster than on stage. That is because nobody is really listening and you allready know the stuff. I often write text for voice-overs and have to add at least 10% to be on the safe side.

It’s interesting that you suggest devoting 50% of the presentation time to audience interaction. I tend to agree with you for my own presentations, but I know that not everyone is ready for that, so for this particular post I stuck to the more conventional 25%. In other posts, I have encouraged people to consider taking questions throughout their presentation rather than making the audience wait till the end.

Good point to about talking faster and your experience with voice-overs. Of course, some people talk even faster during their live presentation because they just want to get it over and done with! So it can be quite individual.

Important post Olivia – going over time is one of the top annoyances for audiences, and it is so easy to avoid!

It is really important to schedule in time for questions, too. In any type of presentation, this is the point at which you can really understand what your audience wants, and justify your views to them. This opportunity should never be underestimated!

Thanks again for a great post.

Hi Jessica I agree with you about the importance of questions. We should also examine the convention of leaving questions till the end of a presentation. Olivia

Great post, as usual.

Among the technics I am using to respect my time, their is “hierarchical structure” and their is a printout plan of my presentation (most of the time, a mind map.)

On my plan, their is the timing of my presentation, and I am using A big iPod as a timer (their is a stopwatch built in).

This way, it is easy to know where I should be at any given moment and to adjust myself.

I wrote a post about this : How to respect allowed time. I explain what is the “hierarchical structure” technic. http://presentability.com/2010/01/29/how-to-respect-allowed-time/

For the questions: it depends of the situation. You have to be strategic. My preference is to have good interaction with the audience by accepting question anytime. I usually don’t have a dedicated question period at the end.

Denis Francois Gravel

Hi Denis That’s a useful post laying out your method for planning a presentation and keeping to time.

I arrive a little belatedly, but still wanted to thank you for the useful points and comments.

My ideal route is to have a time-keeper; at larger international events I find that the event organisers tend to have someone dedicated to this task; provided that you have timed your presentation reasonably well it shouldn’t be a shock when you get the 15 minute board (or whatever).

One very useful tip that’s related to time-keeping that I learned ten minutes before speaking at an event in Brazil; if you’re being ‘live translated’ you need to know how the translated language compares in terms of word density to your own; Latin languages are about a third longer to say the same thing. Fortunately I was able to adapt my presentation as I went, but it’s not an oversight I’ll ever make again!

On the back of reading your post I went to the App Store and downloaded ‘pClock’ for 59p (I have no affiliation to the product): it gives you a large countdown timer that changes colour at pre-specified timing points (it can also give a vibration or sound reminder too).

As for Keynote, I’ve heard it’s very good but I too use PowerPoint and provided that you don’t let it dictate your presentation format or style it’s a capable tool. It’s undoubtedly tarnished by association with the masses of people who, were they to have had access to it, would have made dreary presentations in Keynote too!

Prezi (www.prezi.com) looks really interesting; if I ever have the time to investigate it I could be tempted to switch to that because I think it could deliver an entirely different experience.

Philip Graves

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Hi Philip Thank you very much for adding the benefits of your experience, especially, on the issue of being interpreted. I agree that latin languages use more words, but I wonder whether that actually makes the time longer. My mother is a simultaneous interpreter (English-French) – I’ll ask her. But it doesn’t make sense to me because otherwise the interpreter would constantly be falling behind. And a competent simultaneous interpreter is just that – simultaneous. Olivia

Hi Olivia – a couple of people who’ve had the duty of simultaneously translating me complain that I’m particularly hard to translate live because there is almost no redundancy in my speech and no filler words… they told me they typically use these times to catch up.

(That was into Japanese though, so many things are very different to French or (other?) Latin languages.)

Hello! If you are being interpreted try and talk to the interpreters beforehand. Have a script ready for them (this can be sent days beforehand through the event organiser). Even just a few notes give us a chance to adapt to your vocabulary and mode of thinking. We typically try and follow your trail of thoughts so it helps a great deal.

I would also recommend using less metaphors than usual. But more importantly as already suggested by Simon make a short pause between your sentences and this will give time for interpreters to catch up with you.

Just had a skype call with my mother (Florence above). She added some more useful thoughts.

Don’t slow down your rate of talking, just wait a beat between sentences. Different languages have different ways of ordering words within a sentence, so if you slow down or pause within a sentence, the interpreter may not have enough words to be able to carry on interpreting.

You don’t have to wait for the interpreter to finish interpreting before starting your next sentence. They’re trained to listen and to speak at the same time.

My experience is that unless you have extremely good simultaneous translation (like you get at big international meetings like the UN) you do need to insert a significantly longer pause between sentences – particularly sentences with technical content – than you would normally to let the translation catch up a bit. This is particularly the case if you are speaking English as our bigger vocabulary often makes things easier to say with fewer words. Agree with your translator before hand a signal for “slow down” to make sure she or he isn’t getting swamped by your speed of delivery (it is particualrly important to keep looking for this signal if the translators’ booth isn’t in your normal line of sight) and give them a copy of your slides and any notes so they can check for unfamiliar words or technical vocabulary ahead of time. Provided your audience are using earphones you don’t however need to wait until the translator has finished a sentence before starting the next. If your slides are in the wrong language for some of your audience don’t forget to talk through the slide – “this graphic shows average weekly family spending on xxxx in US dollars on the vertical axis against age of children on the horizontal axis, blue dots mean zzzzzz” and so on.

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This article on the importance of keeping to time during presentations is a true gem.

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The New Rules of Presentations

Sponsor Content from GoToMeeting.

By Simon Morton, Managing Director, Eyeful Presentations Ltd

As you’d expect from a self-confessed presentation geek, the walls of my study are lined with a multitude of books dedicated to the topic of presenting. They vary by area of expertise, presentation technologies, design thinking, and, frankly, quality, yet there is one thing that the vast majority share – an obsession with what I would term “formal presentations.”

You know the type of thing – hints, tips, and sage advice focused on making the most of an engagement where the presenter does all the talking and the audience is only allowed to interject during the Q&A session (or if they’re feeling particularly brave/aggrieved, when they stick their hands up and ask questions). This makes for a nice set of “presentation rules” that are easily shared by the experts, readily consumed by those in search of wisdom, and regularly rehashed by publishers the world over.

It’s a cracking model that has kept authors, readers, and publishers busy for many years. The problem is that this obsession with formal presentations not only ignores the reality of what is going on out there (most presentations are not strictly “formal”), but it’s also creating a tension between perceived best practice and what audiences really want.

Forget the Old Rules

For years we presenters have lived under the impression that if we weren’t standing at the front of the room, pointer in hand and feeling just a little bit sick, we weren’t truly presenting. Indeed the gut-wrenching anxiety that came with ensuring that you were sticking to the rules (no questions or handouts until the end, don’t wave your hands around, a picture paints a thousand words, etc.) was seen as a rite of passage for any would-be presenter. Anything else was just cutting corners.

What a load of old twaddle …

As modern-day presenters, we’re equipped with tools to help us deliver our message in a whole heap of ways, from a cozy chat over a coffee to orating to masses at a conference. Each situation demands a different approach, both in terms of the way presenters deliver their messages and the tools they use. It’s time for presenters (and authors!) to recognize what we at Eyeful term the “presentation landscape” – in short, like audiences, presentations come in all shapes and sizes.

Putting the Audience First

Make no bones about it – the defining factor in deciding where you sit on the presentation landscape is your audience. This might sound like I’m stating the blindingly obvious, but the reality is that few presenters make this leap. They’re too busy thinking about their slides, their breathing, or their attire to take a moment to ask themselves the simple question – how would the audience like to be presented to? Once you recognize that the audience is the most important stakeholder in the whole presentation process, it makes it a whole lot easier for presenters to focus on engaging with the people in front of whom they are standing.

“Smart Casual” Presenting

By embracing this new thinking, we presenters are able to sidestep the long list of “rules” and engage audiences on their terms. Once you’ve taken the step to think beyond the constraints of formal presentations, the sense of freedom is incredibly empowering.

In a way, it’s similar to when organizations woke up to the fact that their employees didn’t need to sit trussed up like chickens wearing neckties and restrictive business suits to work and allowed them to go “smart casual.” Of course, there were those who questioned the move, seeing it as an example of dropping standards, but the reality is that everyone just felt a bit more comfortable. It felt right … which had a direct impact on the quality of the work environment and ultimately the work being produced.

Now of course this doesn’t mean that it’s appropriate to wear jeans and your favorite band T-shirt to every business occasion. Sometimes you need to dress up, put on a starched shirt and your best suit … and sometimes it’s something a little more casual but still smart. Much the same goes for presentations – there’s a time and a place for the rules and restrictions of a formal presentation as well as a more relaxed interactive engagement.

Interactive Presenting – Technology Friend or Foe?

So what does recognition of the presentation landscape mean to the online presenter? The good news is that it gives you the option to think beyond the constraints of technology and formality and put thoughts of how you can engage your audience on their terms foremost in your mind.

The bad news is that engaging audiences has never been more challenging – as a presenter, you’re in direct competition with their email, social media accounts, phones, and, um, lives. Even if you stand in the same room as them, the rules have changed so much that you have no right over their attention – they will happily pull out their smartphones and brazenly commence tweeting, Facebooking, and Candy Crushing if you get it wrong. The stakes are even higher when presenting remotely.

But rather than bemoan the fact, use the reality of the situation as the catalyst for doing things differently. By throwing out the old rules and engaging with audiences on their terms, we can create presentation environments that ensure that your message is delivered clearly and succinctly.

So what tricks can you have up your sleeve when presenting remotely?

1. Engage with your audience early on

This works across the entire presentation landscape but is particularly useful when you’re delivering remotely. For some peculiar reason, polls are massively underutilized in most webinars but actually offer a huge opportunity to engage your audience from the get-go. Naturally it’s all about maintaining a balance – don’t bombard your audience with too many questions (no one wants to feel like they’re being interrogated!), but interaction with your audience at points throughout your presentation is a wonderful way of keeping them on track … and of keeping you informed of their interests.

This then creates another opportunity to build your presentation around the needs of your audience. Imagine the power of having a set of three case studies to hand out but only sharing the one that is of most interest to your online audience. Rather than making an educated guess and making the choice for them, what about polling the audience and asking them which case study is of most interest? Using the (very simple to use) hyperlink features in PowerPoint, Keynote, or Prezi (other slideware is available), you’d then be responding directly to the needs of the audience.

No guessing. No boring your audience with information they have no interest in. No rushing through the good stuff because you’ve got too much content.

Ultimately your audience wants the presentation to be valuable to them and for you to succeed … so why not ask them what’s of most interest to them and then share that?

This is a quick win (excuse the pun). For some reason, presenters feel they have to fill a specific time period (normally 30 minutes or an hour). Why not make them shorter? Ever wonder why TED Talks are no longer than 18 minutes long? Because people get bored (even with the most engaging content) and tend to drift off.

So don’t feel obliged to stretch out your presentation to fill up a predetermined time slot – take as long as you need and no more (no one ever complained about a presentation being too short).

3. Technology is your friend

There will be those who feel that conducting an online presentation is as big a technological leap as they are willing to make. Add to this the concept of polling and they go all aquiver. … While this technophobia is completely understandable, those sticking purely to “ye olde PowerPoint” are potentially missing a trick.

Increasingly, I’ve been using a blend of technologies to engage online audiences. Amid the polls and interactive slides, I’ve been using my tablet as a whiteboarding tool. It allows me to “doodle” certain elements of my presentation and turn a one-way lecture into something more conversational.

Indeed, the science of whiteboarding stacks up – the Aberdeen Group ran a study that pointed to sales presenters using whiteboarding as part of their presentation mix having a 50% higher lead conversion rate. This may be due to greater engagement with the audience, increased interaction, or simply the novelty factor of someone stepping away from PowerPoint … but no doubt a useful contribution to online presentations.

So in Summary

I’m really excited about the state of presentations today. The technology, the importance attached to presenting, and the power of stories all combine to make this an incredibly vibrant area in which to work. But the thing that excites me most is that people are waking up to the fact that the “old rules” no longer need to apply to all presentations. Presenters are taking risks, flipping the perceived wisdom on its head, and, at last, putting audiences first. Those willing to break the mold and disregard the presentation lessons of yesteryear will engage with audiences on a whole new level, which can only be good news for presenter and audience alike.

Now it’s your turn …

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Ace the Presentation

How to Effectively Manage Time During a Presentation? Short and Long Ones!

Slides are one of the best ways to engage an audience and nail a presentation. Nowadays, people use the most efficient and practical skills to make the slides clear, easy to understand. However, most people struggle to plan and manage time in their presentations.

How Many Slides are Suitable for Finishing a Presentation on Time?

The general rule says 1 to 2 slides per minute. However, it is critical to note that the presentation’s number of slides will vary according to the topic complexity, audience, available time, presentation structure and format, and goal. Good planning, rehearsal, and delivery skills are essential!

To be more specific, if you have too many slides in a presentation at the range of 3 to 15 minutes, you will end up confusing your audience or spending a significant part of your time explaining the slides. It does not mean you have to prepare a lot of information and squeeze it into few slides, and the best practice is to summarize your content to understand it easily.

From 25 minutes to 60 minutes, you can make a considerable number of slides. Some experts recommend 1 to 2 slides per minute, but as I said before, it will depend on the topic. Imagine that one of your slides contains graphs about some work you have been doing that can take more than 2 minutes, and it is important to explain it in detail to the audience.

It all starts with planning, researching, organizing all the collected data, prioritizing your key points, and making a structure. After this exercise, it will be easier to know how many slides you will have according to your given time.

To sum this up, there is no exact rule to set a number of slides for a given time frame, and it will vary according to the topic, your research, and your presentation skills. All you have to do is to balance the slides with your speech and time.

How many Slides for a 3-minute Presentation?

For a 3-minute presentation, the presenter should use four slides. Depending on how the slides are structured, 15 seconds to 2 minutes can be spent on each slide.

What really matters is not the amount of the slides but the quality. You can make three powerful slides and nail your presentation or make 5 with too much content and ending up having a boring presentation.

A good practice for a 3 minutes presentation is to keep it clean and straightforward. Keep in mind that slides are more engaging with visuals rather than texts. And on your speech, be as brief as possible, make a 15 to 20 seconds introduction, and do the same on the conclusion.

How many Slides for a 5-minute Presentation?

Five minutes is enough time to deliver your message and engage your audience with content that is straight to the point. The only thing you need to do is keep in mind that every second of your time counts a lot for your presentation.

How many Slides for a 10-minute Presentation?

The Rule of Thumb for a 10-minute presentation is having 10-12 slides. Presenters with good skills use up to 30 seconds per slide to keep it nice and engaging. This time frame is suitable for elaborately introducing the subject or topic, diving deep into it, and highlighting the key points.

According to your topic, you can even make eight slides considering the fact that slides are only the guide of your presentation. That is why it is essential to make an excellent structure to organize your content on the slides properly; this will help you to put aside unnecessary data and focus only on what is essential for the audience.

How many Slides for a 20-minute Presentation?

According to Guy Kawasaki , a 20-minute presentation should have ten slides where each slide utilizes a 30 point font. Using this rule of 10/20/30, the speaker would spend up to 1 minute per slide, which gives time for even allowing 1 or 2 questions from the audience.

To structure a 20 minutes presentation using the rule of 10/20/30 from Guy Kawasaki , you have to use the first slide to introduce your subject, case study, or others, and from the second slide, start diving deep until you get to the conclusion.

In some cases, each slide has a different theme, and you will need to approach them differently. Having different themes per slide will require you to summarize each slide’s content in under a minute.

Although the Rule of Guy Kawasaki is suitable for a 20-minute presentation, you can set your own number of slides according to your subject and how much time you spend on a single slide as long as you deliver the message properly and engage your audience.

How many Slides for a 25-minute Presentation?

For a 25-minute presentation, the general rule is to use 20 to 30 slides. By spending up to two minutes per slide and focusing on the main subject, the speaker can keep the audience engaged for this period of time.

Kawasaki believes that a human being can comprehend at least ten concepts in a meeting. In other words, you have to include in your topic or subject up to ten themes to be discussed. Any More than that can make your audience get confused or bored.

In this given time frame, you now have the opportunity to interact more with the audience, start with a quote, let them raise some clarification questions, and get more involved with them.

How many Slides for a 30-minute Presentation?

Experts recommend 30 to 40 slides to make a memorable presentation. With 30 minutes, the presenter has more options compared to when the given time frame is short. Consider making the content as straightforward as possible. Also, make two paragraphs per slide at the most.

This technique will allow the audience to read all the information on the slide easily and quickly and move to the next one alongside you. If you add too much content on one slide, the audience will likely read something that you are not explaining yet or the opposite.

But you can make more than 40 slides and still have a memorable presentation in just 30 minutes, and I will explain to you how. Well, if you want your audience to understand clearly each content of your slide, make it one paragraph or one sentence, and use more visuals.

Using this method, you will spend 1-2 seconds per slide, and the audience will understand way better seeing the visual (which counts more than text). The explanation is gradual from the beginning to the end.

How many Slides for a 45-minute presentation?

As a general rule, for a 45-minute presentation, between 20 and 50 slides would grant a memorable presentation. Spending 1-2 minutes per slide, the speaker will have time to make a great introduction, interact more with the audience and have a questions and answers session.

A 45-minutes presentation is in the range of long times ones, and in these cases, you have to use the slides very carefully, making them proportional to your presentation time. Consider having a wristwatch to control your time.

A good practice is to use the slides only to guide your speech during the presentation, but you will need to master them. Rehearse the most important of each slide to make sure you spend the right time, or even less. This time management will give you an advantage because you will have enough time to make a great conclusion.

How many Slides for an hour Presentation?

Experts recommend 30 to 60 slides for a 60-minutes presentation. This period of time gives the speaker two main options: summarize the content in 30 slides or make a structure that allows one theme per slide. These two options also give more time to interact with the audience make a great introduction and conclusion.

Both of them are OK. But there are aspects that you have to consider; if you are preparing few slides, you will need to train how to summarize content to make sure you don’t spend too much time explaining all the points or having your audience stuck on reading your slide.

And if you are planning to make one theme per slide to facilitate the understanding to the audience, make sure you spend 30 seconds at the most. But also consider having black screen slides to make pauses or small breaks and entertain or reengage your audience.

How many Slides for a 90-minute Presentation?

A 90-minutes presentation should have not more than 60 slides. In this situation, the speaker will need to know how to keep time on presentations. Experts recommend up to 2 minutes per slide, but depending on how the presentation is flowing, spending more than 2 minutes per slide is possible.

If you fail to make these pauses to double-check if the audience is on the same page with you, you will be running a risk of going back from almost the end of the slides to the first ones to explain something that the audience did not get very well.

How many Slides for a two-hour presentation?

A two-hour presentation would need 60-80 slides to deliver the message memorably. Some experts recommend one theme per slide to make it clear and easily understandable. Keep in mind that a presentation this long requires careful planning and a very well-organized structure.

Generally, a presentation with more than one hour of duration is for professional speakers who can deal with time management. The best way to not have your audience boring is to use the method of one idea per slide; it will make them easily understand each part of your content.

How many Slides for 2+ hours presentations?

Presentations with more than two hours should have not more than 80 slides. Long presentations with over 2 hours, the speaker can organize the information in order to spend 2-3 minutes per slide.

120+ minutes is considered an extended time frame; a good practice is to keep the slides brief and clean to ensure your audience won’t get exhausted.

What are the skills needed to Deliver Long Presentations or Speeches?

For long presentations, several skills are required to ensure successful delivery, such as:

Time management;
Engaging the audience
Solid posture
Good eye contact
Controlling your voice, and more.

All these skills will keep your audience engaged and entertained, and make sure you reserve 15-20 minutes for questions and answers after a long presentation or speech.

How to keep time in your presentation?

First of all, to have complete control of your time on stage, you have to write the schedule of time you will spend on each part of your presentation, something like setting time for your opening, how long time you will spend on the introduction, how long time you reserve for questions and answers, etc.

Make sure you start your presentation on time. If you fail this step, then everything that comes ahead may also delay and end the presentation after the scheduled time. You also need to plan how long your speech will take and have a clock to control it.

Planning is also crucial to keep time on your presentation. The main thing in the plan to deliver your message is the structure of your content. A good structure will allow you to know how much time you will spend on each point.

I have an excellent article with a guide for outlining your speech , which should help you nail this part of the process. A good speech outline is key in managing presentation time.

And last but not least, you need to rehearse before you go on stage. It will allow you to know how much time you need for the presentation and practice to see if you need to remove or add something to your presentation to make it perfect.

Why do people usually fail to finish a presentation within the stipulated time?

Generally, people fail to finish a presentation on time because they do not make a good plan, underestimate rehearsing, and fail at an impromptu delivery attempt at the last minute. What commonly happens is that people make too many slides and fail to go from one to another on time. The rule of thumb says that 1-2 minutes per slide is enough using standards.

Another session that makes speakers fail to finish the presentation in time is the question and answers. This mistake happens when the speaker does not practice enough or predict questions that may come and end up thinking about the answer when the question is raised.

Not setting time for each session of your presentation also makes you not finish on time. This mistake will cause you to take longer at one point or another, especially if you don’t have a clock to keep track of the time.

How to keep your Presentation Brief and Clear

To keep a presentation brief and clear, organize your content to be only one theme per slide. To be more specific, consider having one paragraph or idea per slide, one that is concise, straightforward, and should also include minimalist visuals.

The design is also essential to help you get a clean design. Choose a layout that comfortably suits your text and image. Another detail is the color, which has to be neutral to help the reader focus on the content only.

For More Tips on Designing and Nailing a Presentation, open the recommended articles below.

Designing a Killer Presentation in 8 Steps

Planning and performing a presentation that meets expectations and involves the public requires a lot of care. The details involved in holding a talk will be super important to ensure her success and approval from those who participated. Therefore, we have prepared a post with a few crucial steps that you should follow to organize…

What Makes a Great Presenter? 9 Key Qualities to Look for!

Want to Stand Out? 15 Key Tips for an Awesome Presentation

In conclusion, the number of slides a presentation should have for a given time depends on who is presenting and the topic or subject. And also, it varies according to the methods that you use to deliver your message. As long as it reaches the audience properly and on time, the number of slides should be the least of your concerns.

But you can follow the standards that some experts recommend for a presentation from 3 minutes to 120+ minutes. For example, Guy Kawasaki recommends the rule of 10/20/30 for a 20 minutes presentation. This rule of thumb allows you to have ten slides to be presented in 20 minutes, and the font should be 30 points.

This example shows that you can follow the standards and still have a successful presentation. the main thing you have to do, is a good planning, a good structure, and make your content brief and clear, that will help them understand and enjoy your presentation

References and Further Reading

How to Create a Killer 5-Minute Presentation (hubspot.com)

How Many Slides For A Whatever-Minute Presentation? (slidecow.com)

https://www.soappresentations.com/how-many-slides-should-be-used-for-a-60-minute-presentation/

The ideal number of slides for an hour-long presentation, and other thoughts on preparing slides | I’d Rather Be Writing Blog (idratherbewriting.com)

Presentation Slide Counts (duarte.com)

3 Ways to Choose the Right Number of Slides for a Powerpoint Presentation (wikihow.com)

Brevity, Clarity and Wit: 10 Commandments for a 10-Minute Talk | Cath Lab Digest | HMP Global (hmpgloballearningnetwork.com)

How Many Slides to Use For a 5, 10, 15+ Minute Presentation (tutsplus.com)

The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint – Guy Kawasaki

How Many Slides to Use in a Presentation? 5 Tips | Design Shack

15 Demonstration Speech Ideas and Key Techniques for Your Next Speech

If you have ever been called upon to teach an audience with the help of some visual aids, then you have done a demonstrative speech or a demonstration speech. Hopefully, you did a great job. This article aims to show you how to best carry out a demonstrative speech that does what it is meant…

How to Draft the Best Persuasive Speech Outline?

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7 ORATORY SECRETS: HOW TO GIVE AN EFFECTIVE ORATORICAL SPEECH?

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6 Solid Tips about Making Eye Contact

For most people, their first time addressing a crowd can be so scary and they tend to feel nervous or Jittery. My first time facing the crowd was quite an experience for me. I got on the stage and felt like I needed the ground to open up and take me in. One of the…

How to Analyze an Audience

Do you want to know how to effectively analyze an audience for your public speaking engagements or even work pitches? This skill is crucial in order to ensure that your message resonates with its intended recipient and we will teach you all about how to analyze an audience! To analyze an audience, be aware of…

How to Prepare and Deliver a Great Memorized Speech

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12.3 Speaking in Business Settings

Learning objectives.

Employ audience analysis to adapt communication to supervisors, colleagues, employees, and clients.
Explain the role of intercultural communication competence in intercultural business communication contexts.
Identify strategies for handling question-and-answer periods.
Identify strategies for effectively planning and delivering common business presentations, including briefings, reports, training, and meetings.

Most people’s goal for a college degree is to work in a desired career field. Many of you are probably working while taking this class and already have experience with speaking in business settings. As you advance in your career, and potentially change career paths as many Americans do now, the nature of your communication and the contexts in which you speak will change. Today’s workers must be able to adapt content, level of formality, and format to various audiences including the public, clients, and colleagues (Dannels, 2001). What counts as a good communicator for one audience and in one field may not in another. There is wide variety of research and resources related to business communication that cannot be included in this section. The International Association of Business Communicators is a good resource for people interested in a career in this area: http://www.iabc.com .

Adapt to Your Audience

Speaking in business settings requires adaptability as a communicator. Hopefully the skills that you are building to improve your communication competence by taking this class will enable you to be adaptable and successful. The following suggestions for adapting to your audience are based on general characteristics; therefore expect variations and exceptions. A competent communicator can use categories and strategies like these as a starting point but must always monitor the communication taking place and adapt as needed. In many cases, you may have a diverse audience with supervisors, colleagues, and employees, in which case you would need to employ multiple strategies for effective business communication.

Even though much of the day-to-day communication within organizations is written in the form of memos, e-mails, and reports, oral communication has an important place. The increase in documentation is related to an epidemic of poor listening. Many people can’t or don’t try to retain information they receive aurally, while written communication provides a record and proof that all the required and detailed information was conveyed. An increase in written communication adds time and costs that oral communication doesn’t. Writing and reading are slower forms of communication than speaking, and face-to-face speaking uses more human senses, allows for feedback and clarification, and helps establish relationships (Nichols & Stevens, 1999).

Much communication in the workplace is written for the sake of documentation. Oral communication, however, is often more efficient if people practice good listening skills.

Queen’s University – Alumn i Volunteer Summit – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

It’s important to remember that many people do not practice good listening skills and that being understood contributes to effectiveness and success. You obviously can’t make someone listen better or require him or her to listen actively, but you can strive to make your communication more listenable and digestible for various audiences.

Speaking to Executives/Supervisors

Upward communication includes speeches, proposals, or briefings that are directed at audience members who hold higher positions in the organizational hierarchy than the sender. Upward communication is usually the most lacking within an organization, so it is important to take advantage of the opportunity and use it to your advantage (Nichols & Stevens, 1999). These messages usually function to inform supervisors about the status or results of projects and provide suggestions for improvement, which can help people feel included in the organizational process and lead to an increased understanding and acceptance of management decisions (Adler & Elmhorst, 2005). So how do we adapt messages for upward communication?

The “executive summary” emerged from the fact that executives have tightly scheduled days and prefer concise, relevant information. Executive summaries are usually produced in written form but must also be conveyed orally. You should build some repetition and redundancy into an oral presentation of an executive summary, but you do not need such repetition in the written version. This allows you to emphasize a main idea while leaving some of the supporting facts out of an oral presentation. If an executive or supervisor leaves a presentation with a clear understanding of the main idea, the supporting material and facts will be meaningful when they are reviewed later. However, leaving a presentation with facts but not the main idea may result in the need for another presentation or briefing, which costs an organization time and money. Even when such a misunderstanding is due to the executives’ poor listening skills, it will likely be you who is blamed.

Employees want to be seen as competent, and demonstrating oral communication skills is a good way to be noticed and show off your technical and professional abilities (Bartolome, 1999). Presentations are “high-visibility tasks” that establish a person’s credibility when performed well (Weinholdt, 2006). Don’t take advantage of this visibility to the point that you perform only for the boss or focus on him or her at the expense of other people in the audience. Do, however, tailor your message to the “language of executives.” Executives and supervisors often have a more macro perspective of an organization and may be concerned with how day-to-day tasks match with the mission and vision of the organization. So making this connection explicit in your presentation can help make your presentation stand out.

Be aware of the organizational hierarchy and territory when speaking to executives and supervisors. Steering into terrain that is under someone else’s purview can get you in trouble if that person guards his or her territory (McCaskey, 1999). For example, making a suggestion about marketing during a presentation about human resources can ruffle the marketing manager’s feathers and lead to negative consequences for you. Also be aware that it can be challenging to deliver bad news to a boss. When delivering bad news, frame it in a way that highlights your concern for the health of the organization. An employee’s reluctance to discuss problems with a boss leads to more risk for an organization (Bartolome, 1999). The sooner a problem is known, the better for the organization.

Speaking to Colleagues

Much of our day-to-day communication in business settings is horizontal communication with our colleagues or people who are on the same approximate level in the organizational hierarchy. This communication may occur between colleagues working in the same area or between colleagues with different areas of expertise. Such horizontal communication usually functions to help people coordinate tasks, solve problems, and share information. When effective, this can lead to more cooperation among employees and a greater understanding of the “big picture” or larger function of an organization. When it is not effective, this can lead to territoriality, rivalry, and miscommunication when speaking across knowledge and task areas that require specialization (Adler & Elmhorst, 2005).

Many colleagues work collaboratively to share ideas and accomplish tasks together. In a sharing environment, it can be easy to forget where an idea started. This becomes an issue when it comes time for credit or recognition to be given. Make sure to give credit to people who worked with you on a project or an idea. If you can’t remember where an idea came from, it may be better to note that it was a “group effort” than to assume it was yours and risk alienating a colleague.

Speaking to Supervisees/Employees

Downward communication includes messages directed at audience members who hold a lower place on the organizational hierarchy than the sender. As a supervisor, you will also have to speak to people whom you manage or employ. Downward communication usually involves job instructions, explanations of organizational policies, providing feedback, and welcoming newcomers to an organization.

Supervisors can set a good example by keeping a good flow of information going to their employees.

Wikimedia Commons – public domain.

This type of communication can have positive results in terms of preventing or correcting employee errors and increasing job satisfaction and morale. If the communication is not effective, it can lead to unclear messages that lead to misunderstandings and mistakes (Adler & Elmhorst, 2005).

During this type of “top-down” communication, employees may not ask valuable questions. So it is important to create an open atmosphere that encourages questions. Even though including an open discussion after a presentation takes more time, it helps prevent avoidable mistakes and wasted time and money. Let your audience know before a presentation that you will take questions, and then officially open the floor to questions when you are ready. Question-and-answer sessions are a good way to keep information flowing in an organization, and there is more information about handling these sessions in the “Getting Competent” box in this chapter.

A good supervisor should keep his or her employees informed, provide constructive feedback, explain the decisions and policies of the organization, be honest about challenges and problems, and facilitate the flow of information (Bartolome, 1999). Information should flow to and away from supervisors. Supervisors help set the tone for the communication climate of an organization and can serve as models of expectations of oral communication. Being prepared, consistent, open, and engaging helps sustain communication, which helps sustain morale. Supervisors also send messages, intentional or unintentional, based on where they deliver their presentations. For example, making people come to the executive conference room may be convenient for the boss but intimidating for other workers (Larkin & Larkin, 1999).

Speaking to Clients / Customers / Funding Sources

Communication to outside stakeholders includes messages sent from service providers to people who are not employed by the organization but conduct business with or support it. These stakeholders include clients, customers, and funding sources. Communication to stakeholders may be informative or persuasive. When first starting a relationship with one of these stakeholders, the communication is likely to be persuasive in nature, trying to convince either a client to take services, a customer to buy a product, or a funding source to provide financing. Once a relationship is established, communication may take the form of more informative progress reports and again turn persuasive when it comes time to renegotiate or renew a contract or agreement.

As with other types of workplace communication, information flow is important. Many people see a lack of information flow as a sign of trouble, so make sure to be consistent in your level of communication through progress reports or status briefings even if there isn’t a major development to report. Strategic ambiguity may be useful in some situations, but too much ambiguity also leads to suspicions that can damage a provider-client relationship. Make sure your nonverbal communication doesn’t contradict your verbal communication.

When preparing for a presentation to clients, customers, or funding sources, start to establish a relationship before actually presenting. This will help you understand what they want and need and will allow you to tailor your presentation to their needs. These interactions also help establish rapport, which can increase your credibility. Many people making a proposal mistakenly focus on themselves or their product or service. Focus instead on the needs of the client. Listen closely to what they say and then explain their needs as you see them and how your product or service will satisfy those needs (Adler & Elmhorst, 2005). Focus on the positive consequences or benefits that will result from initiating a business relationship with you. If you’ll recall from Chapter 11 “Informative and Persuasive Speaking” , this is similar to Monroe’s Motivated Sequence organization pattern, which gets the audience’s attention, establishes the existence of a need or problem, presents a solution to fill the need, asks the audience to visualize positive results of adopting the solution, and then calls the audience to action.

Use sophisticated and professional visual aids to help sell your idea, service, or product. You can use strategies from our earlier discussion of visual aids, but add a sales twist. Develop a “money slide” that gets the audience’s attention with compelling and hopefully selling content that makes audience members want to reach for their pen to sign a check or a contract (Morgan & Whitener, 2006).

Include a “money slide” in your presentation to potential clients or customers that really sells your idea.

Yair Aronshtam – Slide projector – CC BY-SA 2.0.

Proposals and pitches may be cut short, so imagine what you would do if you arrived to present and were told that you had to cut it down to one minute. If you were prepared, you could pull out your money slide. The money slide could be the most important finding, a startling or compelling statistic, an instructive figure or chart, or some other combination of text and graphic that connects to the listener. Avoid the temptation to make a complicated money slide. The point isn’t to fit as much as you can onto one slide but to best communicate the most important idea or piece of information you have. A verbal version of the money slide is the elevator speech. This is your sales pitch that captures the highlights of what you have to offer that can be delivered in a short time frame. I recommend developing a thirty-second, one-minute, and two-minute version of your elevator speech and having it on standby at all times.

Speaking in Intercultural Contexts

It’s no surprise that business communication is occurring in more intercultural contexts. Many companies and consulting firms offer cross-cultural training for businesspeople, and college programs in cross-cultural training and international business also help prepare people to conduct business in intercultural contexts. For specific information about conducting business in more than thirty-two countries, you can visit the following link: http://www.cyborlink.com .

While these trainings and resources are beneficial, many people expect intercultural business communication training to be reduced to a series of checklists or rules for various intercultural interactions that may be conveyed in a two-hour, predeparture “everything you need to know about Japanese business culture” training. This type of culture-specific approach to cross-cultural training does not really stand up to the complex situations in which international business communicators find themselves (Victor, 1993). Scholars trained more recently in culture and communication prefer a culture-general approach that focuses on “tools” rather than “rules.” Remember that intercultural competence is relative to the native and host cultures of the people involved in an intercultural encounter, and therefore notions of what is interculturally competent change quickly (Ulijn et al., 2000). To review some of our earlier discussion, elements of intercultural competence involve the ability to identify potential misunderstandings before they occur, be a high self-monitor, and be aware of how self and others make judgments of value (Ulijn et al., 2000).

I will overview some intercultural business communication tips that are more like rules, but remember there are always exceptions, so other competent communication skills should be on standby to help you adapt when the rules approach stops working (Thrush, 1993).

In terms of verbal communication, make sure to use good pronunciation and articulation. Even if you speak a different language than your audience, clearer communication on your part will help the message get through better. Avoid idiomatic expressions and acronyms, since the meaning of those types of verbal communication are usually only known to cultural insiders. Try to use geographically and culturally relevant examples—for example, referencing the World Cup instead of the World Series. Be aware of differences in communication between high- and low-context cultures. Note that people from low-context cultures may feel frustrated by the ambiguity of speakers from high-context cultures, while speakers from high-context cultures may feel overwhelmed or even insulted by the level of detail used by low-context communicators. The long history of family businesses doing business with family businesses in France means that communication at meetings and in business letters operates at a high context. Dates and prices may not be mentioned at all, which could be very frustrating for an American businessperson used to highly detailed negotiations. The high level of detail used by US Americans may be seen as simplistic or childish to audience members from high-context cultures. Include some materials in the native language or include a glossary of terms if you’re using specific or new vocabulary. Don’t assume that the audience needs it, but have it just in case.

Also be aware that different cultures interpret graphics differently. Two well-known cases of differing interpretations of graphics involve computer icons. First, the “trash” icon first used on Mac desktops doesn’t match what wastebaskets look like in many other countries. Second, the US-style “mailbox” used as an icon for many e-mail programs doesn’t match with the mail experiences of people in most other countries and has since been replaced by the much more universally recognizable envelope icon. Nonelectronic symbols also have different cultural meanings. People in the United States often note that they are pursuing the “blue ribbon” prize or standard in their business, which is the color ribbon used to designate second place in the United Kingdom.

“Getting Competent”

Handling Question-and-Answer Periods

Question-and-answer (Q&A) periods allow for important interaction between a speaker and his or her audience. Speakers should always be accountable for the content of their speech, whether informative or persuasive, and making yourself available for questions is a good way to demonstrate such accountability. Question-and-answer sessions can take many forms in many contexts. You may entertain questions after a classroom or conference presentation. Colleagues often have questions after a briefing or training. Your supervisor or customers may have questions after a demonstration. Some question-and-answer periods, like ones after sales pitches or after presentations to a supervisor, may be evaluative, meaning you are being judged in terms of your content and presentation. Others may be more information based, meaning that people ask follow-up questions or seek clarification or more detail. In any case, there are some guidelines that may help you more effectively handle question-and-answer periods (Toastmasters International, 2012; Morgan & Whitener, 2006).

Setting the stage for Q&A. If you know you will have a Q&A period after your presentation, alert your audience ahead of time. This will prompt them to take note of questions as they arise, so they don’t forget them by the end of the talk. Try to anticipate questions that the audience may have and try to proactively answer them in the presentation if possible; otherwise, be prepared to answer them at the end. At the end of your presentation, verbally and nonverbally indicate that the Q&A session is open. You can verbally invite questions and nonverbally shift your posture or position to indicate the change in format.

Reacting to questions. In evaluative or informative Q&A periods, speakers may feel defensive of their idea, position, or presentation style. Don’t let this show to the audience. Remember, accountability is a good thing as a speaker, and audience members usually ask pertinent and valid questions, even if you think they aren’t initially. Repeating a question after it is asked serves several functions. It ensures that people not around the person asking the question get to hear it. It allows speakers to start to formulate a response as they repeat the question. It also allows speakers to ensure they understood the question correctly by saying something like “What I hear you asking is…” Once you’ve repeated the question, respond to the person who posed the question, but also address the whole audience. It is awkward when a speaker just talks to one person. Be cautious not to overuse the statement “That’s a good question.” Saying that more than once or twice lessens its sincerity.

Keeping the Q&A on track. To help keep the Q&A period on track, tie a question to one of the main ideas from your presentation and make that connection explicit in your response. Having a clearly stated and repeated main idea for your presentation will help set useful parameters for which questions fall within the scope of the presentation and which do not. If someone poses a question that is irrelevant or off track, you can politely ask them to relate it to a main idea from the talk. If they can’t, you can offer to talk to them individually about their question after the session. Don’t engage with an irrelevant question, even if you know the answer. Answering one “off-track” question invites more, which veers the Q&A session further from the main idea.

Responding to multipart questions. People often ask more than one question at a time. As a speaker and audience member this can be frustrating. Countless times, I have seen a speaker only address the second question and then never get back to the first. By that point, the person who asked the question and the audience have also usually forgotten about the first part of the question. As a speaker, it is perfectly OK to take notes during a Q&A session. I personally take notes to help me address multipart questions. You can also verbally reiterate the question to make sure you know which parts need to be addressed, and then address the parts in order.

Managing “Uh-oh!” moments. If a person corrects something you said in error during your presentation, thank them for the correction. After the presentation, verify whether or not it was indeed a mistake, and if it was, make sure to correct your information so you don’t repeat the mistake in future talks. Admit when you don’t know the answer to a question. It’s better to admit that you do not know the answer than to try to fake your way through it. An audience member may also “correct” you with what you know is incorrect information. In such cases, do not get into a back-and-forth argument with the person; instead, note that the information you have is different and say you will look into it.

Concluding the Q&A session. Finally, take control of your presentation again toward the end of the Q&A session. Stop taking questions in time to provide a brief wrap-up of the questions, reiterate the main idea, thank the audience for their questions, and conclude the presentation. This helps provide a sense of closure and completeness for the presentation.

Which of these tips could you have applied to previous question-and-answer sessions that you have participated in to make them more effective?
Imagine you are giving a presentation on diversity in organizations and someone asks a question about affirmative action, which was not a part of your presentation. What could you say to the person?
In what situations in academic, professional, or personal contexts of your life might you be engaged in an evaluative Q&A session? An information-based Q&A session?

Common Business Presentations

Now you know how to consider your audience in terms of upward, downward, or horizontal communication. You also know some of the communication preferences of common career fields. Now we will turn our attention to some of the most frequent types of business presentations: briefings, reports, training, and meetings.

Briefings are short presentations that either update listeners about recent events or provide instructions for how to do something job related (Adler & Elmhorst, 2005). Briefings may occur as upward, downward, or horizontal communication. An industrial designer briefing project managers on the preliminary results of testing on a new product design is an example of upward briefing. A nurse who is the shift manager briefing an incoming shift of nurses on the events of the previous shift is an example of downward briefing. A representative from human resources briefing colleagues on how to use the new workplace identification badges is an example of horizontal briefing. Briefings that provide instructions like how to use a new identification badge are called technical briefings, and they are the most common type of workplace presentation (Toastmasters International, 2012). For technical briefings, consider whether your audience is composed of insiders, outsiders, or a mixture of people different levels of familiarity with the function, operation, and/or specifications of the focus of the briefing. As we have already discussed, technical speaking requires an ability to translate unfamiliar or complex information into content that is understandable and manageable for others.

Technical briefings, which explain how something functions or works, are the most common type of workplace presentations.

Shamim Mohamed – Debrief – CC BY-SA 2.0.

As the name suggests, briefings are brief —usually two or three minutes. Since they are content focused, they do not require formal speech organization, complete with introduction and conclusion. Briefings are often delivered as a series of bullet points, organized topically or chronologically. The content of a briefing is usually a summary of information or a series of distilled facts, so there are rarely elements of persuasion in a briefing or much supporting information. A speaker may use simple visual aids, like an object or even a one-page handout, but more complex visual aids are usually not appropriate. In terms of delivery, briefings should be organized. Since they are usually delivered under time constraints and contain important information, brief notes and extemporaneous delivery are effective (Adler & Elmhorst, 2005).

There are numerous types of reports. The line between a briefing and short oral report is fuzzy, but in general a report is a more substantial presentation on the progress or status of a task. Reports can focus on the past, present, or future. Reports on past events may result from some type of investigation. For example, a company may be interested in finding the cause of a 15 percent decline in revenue for a branch office. Investigative reports are also focused on past events and may include a follow-up on a customer or employee complaint.

Reports on the present are often status or progress reports. Various departments or teams that make up an organization, or committees that make up a governing board, are likely to give status reports. Status reports may focus on a specific project or task or simply report on the regular functioning of a group.

Components of a Status Report (Adler & Elmhorst, 2005)

State the group or committee’s task or purpose.
Describe the current status, including work done by the group and/or individuals and the methods used.
Report on obstacles encountered and efforts to overcome them
Describe the next goal or milestone of the group and offer concrete action steps and a timeline for achieving the goal.

Final reports are presented at the conclusion of a task and are similar to a progress report but include a discussion and analysis of the results of an effort. While some progress reports may only be delivered verbally, with no written component, a final report almost always has an associated written document. The written final report usually contains much more detail than is included in the oral final report, and this detail is referenced for audience members to consult if they desire more information (Adler & Elmhorst, 2005).

A common future-focused report is the feasibility report , which explores potential actions or steps and then makes recommendations for future action based on methodical evaluation. The purpose of these reports is basically to determine if an action or step is a good idea for an organization. Facebook made a much-discussed move to go public in 2012, a decision that was no doubt made after analyzing many feasibility reports.

Components of a Feasibility Report (Adler & Elmhorst, 2005)

Introduction to a problem or situation and its potential consequences
Overview of the standards used for evaluating potential courses of action
Overview of process used to identify and evaluate courses of action
Details of potential courses of action
Evaluation of the potential courses of action
Recommendation of best course of action

People in supervisory or leadership positions often provide training , which includes presentations that prepare new employees for their jobs or provide instruction or development opportunities for existing employees. While some training is conducted by inside and outside consultants, the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics notes that about 75 percent of training is delivered informally while on the job (Adler & Elmhorst, 2005). As the training and development field expands, this informal training is likely to be replaced by more formalized training delivered by training professionals, many of whom will be employees of the company who have been certified to train specific areas. Organizations are investing more time and money in training because they recognize the value in having well-trained employees and then regularly adding to that training with continued development opportunities. Common focuses of training include the following:

Compliance with company policies. Includes training and orienting new hires and ongoing training for existing employees related to new or changing company policies.
Changing workplace environments. Diversity training and cross-cultural training for international business.
Compliance with legal policies. Sexual harassment, equal employment, Americans with Disabilities Act, and ethics training.
Technical training. Instructions for software, hardware, and machinery.

Companies are also investing money in training for recent college graduates who have degrees but lack the technical training needed to do a specific job. This upfront investment pays off in many situations, as this type of standardized training in field-specific communication skills and technology can lead to increased productivity.

Corporate trainers prepare new employees for their jobs and provide development opportunities for existing employees.

Louisiana GOHSEP – Employees Attend Training Classes – CC BY-SA 2.0.

Trainers require specific skills and an ability to adapt to adult learners (Ray, 1993). Important training skills include technical skills specific to a discipline, interpersonal skills, organizational skills, and critical thinking skills. Trainers must also be able to adapt to adult learners, who may have more experience than the trainer. Training formats usually include a mixture of information presentation formats such as minilecture and discussion as well as experiential opportunities for trainees to demonstrate competence such as role-play, simulation, and case-study analysis and application. Trainers should remember that adult learners learn best by doing, have previous experience that trainers can and should draw on, have different motivations for learning than typical students, and have more competing thoughts and distractions. Adult learners often want information distilled down to the “bottom line”; demonstrating how content is relevant to a specific part of their work duties or personal success is important.

Steps in Developing a Training Curriculum (Beebe, Mottet, & Roach, 2004)

Do background research based on literature on and observations of the training context you will be in.
Conduct a needs assessment to see what sort of training is desired/needed.
Develop training objectives based on research, observations, and needs assessment. Objectives should be observable, measurable, attainable, and specific.
Develop content that connects to the needs assessment.
Determine the time frame for training; make the training as efficient as possible.
Determine methods for delivering content that connect with objectives developed earlier.
Select and/or create training materials.
Create a participant’s guide that contains each activity and module of the training.
Include the following for each training activity: objectives, training content, time frame, method, and materials needed.
Test the training plan on a focus group or with experts in the field to evaluate and revise if necessary.

Over eleven million meetings are held each day in the United States, so it is likely that you will attend and lead meetings during your career. Why do we have meetings? The fundamental reason is to get a group of people with different experiences and viewpoints together to share their knowledge and/or solve a problem. Despite their frequency and our familiarity with them, meetings are often criticized for being worthless, a waste of time, and unnecessary. Before you call a meeting, ask yourself if it is necessary, since some issues are better resolved through a phone call, an e-mail, or a series of one-on-one meetings. Ask the following questions to help make sure the meeting is necessary: What is the goal of the meeting? What would be the consequences of not having it? How will I judge whether the meeting was successful or not? (Jay, 1999)

Meetings are important at the early stages of completing a task, as they help define a work team since the members share a space and interact with each other. Subsequent meetings should be called when people need to pool knowledge, refine ideas, consider new information, or deliberate over a decision. Most meetings are committee size, which ranges from three to ten people. The frequency of the meeting will help determine how the meeting should be run. Groups that meet daily will develop a higher level of cohesion and be able to work through an agenda quickly with little review. Most groups meet less frequently, so there typically needs to be a structured meeting agenda that includes informational items, old business, and new business.

In determining the meeting agenda, define the objectives for various items. Some items will be informative, meaning they transmit information and don’t require a decision or an action. Other items will be constructive, in that they require something new to be devised or decided, such as determining a new policy or procedure. Once a new policy or procedure has been determined, a group must decide on the executive components of their decision, such as how it will be implemented and who will have responsibilities in the process. As the items progress from informational, to constructive, to executive, the amount of time required for each item increases, which will have an effect on the planning of the agenda (Jay, 1999).

After completing the agenda, continue to plan for the meeting by providing attendees with the agenda and any important supporting or supplementary materials such as meeting minutes or reports ahead of time. Consult with people who will attend a meeting beforehand to see if they have any questions about the meeting and to remind them to review the materials. You can also give people a “heads up” about any items for discussion that may be lengthy or controversial. Make sure the meeting room can accommodate the number of attendees and arrange the seating to a suitable structure, typically one where everyone can see each other. A meeting leader may also want to divide items up as “for information,” “for discussion,” or “for decision.” Start the meeting by sharing the objective(s) that you determined in your planning. This will help hold you and the other attendees accountable and give you something to assess to determine the value of the meeting.

People’s attention spans wane after the first twenty minutes of a meeting, so it may be useful to put items that warrant the most attention early on the agenda. It is also a good idea to put items that the group can agree on and will unify around before more controversial items on which the group may be divided. Anything presented at the meeting that wasn’t circulated ahead of time should be brief, so people aren’t spending the meeting reading through documents. To help expedite the agenda, put the length of time you think will be needed for each item or category of items on the agenda. It is important to know when to move from one item to the next. Sometimes people continue to talk even after agreement has been reached, which is usually a waste of time. You want to manage the communication within the meeting but still encourage people to speak up and share ideas. Some people take a more hands-on approach to managing the conversation than others. As the president of the graduate student body, I attended a few board of trustees meetings at my university. The chairperson of the committee had a small bell that she would ring when people got off track, engaged in personal conversations, or were being disruptive to the order of the group.

At the end of the meeting make sure to recap what was accomplished. Return to the objective you shared at the beginning and assess whether or not you accomplished it. If people feel like they get somewhere during a meeting, they will think more positively about the next one. Compile the meeting minutes in a timely fashion, within a few days and no more than a week after the meeting (Jay, 1999).

Tips for Running Effective Meetings

Distribute an agenda to attendees two to three days in advance of the meeting.
Divide items up on the agenda into “for information,” “for discussion,” and “for decision.”
Put items that warrant close attention early on the agenda.
Since senior attendees’ comments may influence or limit junior people’s comments, ask for comments from junior attendees first.
People sometimes continue talking even after agreement has been reached, so it’s important to know when to move on to the next item in the agenda.
At the end of a meeting, recap what was accomplished and set goals for the next meeting.
Compile meeting minutes within forty-eight hours and distribute them to the attendees.

Key Takeaways

What counts as being a good communicator in one business context doesn’t in another, so being able to adapt to various business settings and audiences will help you be more successful in your career.
Upward business communication involves communicating messages up the organizational hierarchy. This type of communication is usually the most lacking in organizations. However, since oral presentations are a “high-visibility” activity, taking advantage of these opportunities can help you get noticed by bosses and, if done well, can move you up the organizational ladder. Present information succinctly in an executive summary format, building in repetition of main ideas in the oral delivery that aren’t necessary for the written version. Don’t just focus on the boss if there are other people present, but do connect to the vision and mission of the organization, since most managers and executives have a “big picture” view of the organization.
Horizontal communication is communication among colleagues on the same level within an organizational hierarchy. This type of communication helps coordinate tasks and lets people from various parts of an organization get a better idea of how the whole organization functions. Many workplaces are becoming more collaborative and team oriented, but make sure you share credit for ideas and work accomplished collaboratively so as not to offend a colleague.
Downward communication includes messages traveling down the organizational hierarchy. These messages usually focus on giving instructions, explaining company policies, or providing feedback. As a supervisor, make sure to encourage employees to ask questions following a presentation. Good information flow helps prevent employee errors and misunderstandings, which saves money.
Initial communication with clients, customers, or funding sources is usually persuasive in nature, as you will be trying to secure their business. Later communication may be more informative status reports. Connect your message to their needs rather than focusing on what you offer. Use persuasive strategies like positive motivation, and always have a “money slide” prepared that gets across the essence of what you offer in one attractive message.
When adapting business communication to intercultural contexts, take a “tools not rules” approach that focuses on broad and adaptable intercultural communication competence.

There are various types of business presentations for which a speaker should be prepared:

Briefings are short, two- to three-minute “how-to” or “update” presentations that are similar to factual bullet points.
Reports can be past, present, or future focused and include status, final, and feasibility reports.
Trainings are informal or formal presentations that help get new employees ready for their jobs and keep existing employees informed about changing policies, workplace climates, and legal issues.
To have an effective meeting, first make sure it is necessary to have, then set a solid foundation by distributing an agenda in advance, manage the flow of communication during the meeting, and take note of accomplishments to promote a positive view of future meetings.
Identify a recent instance when you engaged in upward, horizontal, downward, or intercultural communication in a business setting. Analyze that communication encounter based on the information in the corresponding section of this chapter. What was done well and what could have been improved?
Prepare a briefing presentation on how to prepare a briefing. Make sure to follow the suggestions in the chapter.
Think of a time when you received training in a business or academic setting. Was the communication of the trainer effective? Why or why not?

Adler, R. B. and Jeanne Marquardt Elmhorst, Communicating at Work: Principles and Practices for Businesses and the Professions , 8th ed. (Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill, 2005), 15.

Bartolome, F., “Nobody Trusts the Boss Completely—Now What?” in Harvard Business Review on Effective Communication (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1999), 92.

Beebe, S. A., Timothy A. Mottet, and K. David Roach, Training and Development: Enhancing Communication and Leadership Skills (Boston, MA: Pearson, 2004).

Dannels, D. P., “Time to Speak Up: A Theoretical Framework of Situated Pedagogy and Practice for Communication across the Curriculum,” Communication Education 50, no. 2 (2001): 144.

Jay, A., “How to Run a Meeting,” in Harvard Business Review on Effective Communication (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1999), 34.

Larkin, T. J. and Sandar Larkin, “Reaching and Changing Frontline Employees,” in Harvard Business Review on Effective Communication (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1999), 152.

McCaskey, M. B., “The Hidden Messages Managers Send,” in Harvard Business Review on Effective Communication (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1999), 128.

Morgan, S. and Barrett Whitener, Speaking about Science: A Manual for Creating Clear Presentations (New York, NY: Cambridge, 2006), 18.

Nichols, R. G. and Leonard A. Stevens, “Listening to People,” in Harvard Business Review on Effective Communication (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1999), 14–15.

Ray, R. L., “Introduction: The Academic as Corporate Consultant,” in Bridging Both Worlds: The Communication Consultant in Corporate America , ed. Rebecca L. Ray (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993), 6–8.

Thrush, E. A., “Bridging the Gaps: Technical Communication in an International and Multicultural Society,” Technical Communication Quarterly 2, no. 3 (1993): 275–79.

Toastmasters International, “Proposals and Pitches” accessed March 17, 2012, http://www.toastmasters.org/MainMenuCategories/FreeResources/NeedHelpGivingaSpeech/BusinessPresentations/ProposalsandPitches.aspx

Ulijn, J., Dan O’Hair, Matthieu Weggeman, Gerald Ledlow, and H. Thomas Hall, “Innovation, Corporate Strategy, and Cultural Context: What Is the Mission for International Business Communication?” Journal of Business Communication 37 (2000): 301.

Victor, D., “Cross-Cultural Communication” in Bridging Both Worlds: The Communication Consultant in Corporate America , ed. Rebecca L. Ray (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993), 113.

Weinholdt, R., “Taking the Trauma Out of the Talk,” The Information Management Journal 40, no. 6 (2006): 62.

Communication in the Real World Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

11 Steps to Help You Keep Time During Your Presentation

Anushka kala.

Body Language & Delivery

time is limited when it comes yo your presentation

Some researchers say that the attention span of the human mind is only about 8 seconds. Even if we assume this to be a more pessimistic approach, there still exists a huge challenge faced by every presenter, in keeping their audience enraptured.

A key concept that successful orators and presenters use is the dictum of the ABC in effective communication: Accuracy, Brevity , and Clarity. These are bound by one common factor– time, or as we like to call it, the muslin minute .

This mantra ensures that the underlying principle of effective communication is adhered to, and forms the backbone of any good presentation.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Frantically Speaking (@frantically.speaking)

Here’s why keeping time is so important, in any presentation:

Importance of Keeping Time :

1. prioritize your audience:.

Let’s face it, as a presenter, one unfortunately does not have the luxury to speak for hours together, with no time restriction.

While it is important to get the message across, it is also essential to do so, while respecting the audience’s and/or organiser’s time.

Ever so often, there may be multiple speakers presenting one after the other, which makes adhering to the given time limit even more necessary.

Additionally, the audience too would have multiple commitments to get to, post your presentation, and thus, considering these factors is pivotal.

2. Limited Attention- A Tension:

The fact of the matter is that no matter how interesting the subject may be, the human mind is easily distracted, resulting in a loss of attention.

For a presenter, this poses as a challenge, as the main goal is to ensure that the subject being discussed is thoroughly understood and retained.

Hence, following the time limit and preparing your material concisely, and in accordance to the same, will help in making your presentation effective in nature.

3. More Information:

Yes, you read that right. One may ask how keeping time will help propagate more information.

An important point to be kept in mind is the fact that presentations aren’t merely about reading the slides of a PowerPoint presentation, but also depend majorly on any form of discussion (usually Q&A) where queries are addressed and doubts are cleared, so as to ensure an in-depth understanding of the subject.

Thus, presenters must allocate enough time for an interactive session with their audience, in addition to the ‘talking time’ to skim through and explain the presentation itself.

Now having understood the importance of following and respecting the time limit, let’s now move on to understanding how to do so.

How to Time Your Presentation:

1. what’s the time :.

The first step is to simply ask and know what your time limit is. Always note it down in case you forget.

If no time limit is specified, try consciously packaging your material in a succinct manner, so as to respect your audience’s time.

Regularly follow-up with the organizers, in case of any changes.

2. Know it All:

collect important information for your presentation

Know what you have to say.

If you’ve been given a subject or are asked to present a topic of your choice, it is important to be absolutely well-versed with the required concepts, what it entails, and the sub-topics you would want to cover within the given duration.

If your knowledge is inadequate on your end, it could result in a lot of wastage of time– after all, your goal of communicating efficiently with your audience is obstructed.

You must also know how to work your way around the technology you use. While it does make life simpler, it could also end up wasting time, if you don’t know how to use it well.

Don’t worry, we’ve got your back. Keep reading this article to find out some tips, shortcuts and tricks that can enhance your presentation.

3. Ration your Duration:

write, organise and schedule your material for the presentation.

Once you’ve made note of your time limit and have an idea of the concepts you wish to cover, it is crucial for you to begin scheduling your information and placing them in your slides accordingly.

Structure your presentation in accordance to the given time, and allocate a certain duration per slide/ concept. This will give you a blueprint of your presentation, and ensure its smooth sailing.

Related Article: Effective Speech Transitions: How To Make Your Speech Flow

4. Time Yourself:

recording and timing yourself during a presentation does wonders.

Keep timing and recording yourself while practicing.

This practice helps you recognize areas you could cut, need be, as well as gives you an idea on how the presentation would sound to your audience.

There are so many more benefits to this, and is something one must most definitely inculcate. Read more about this here .

5. Write Your Speech:

Write each and every word of your speech. Don’t take shortcuts through bullet points and summaries.

While it is not essential to memorise your entire speech, it is scientifically proven that writing helps you process, analyse and retain information much better, which is necessary when it comes to public speaking.

This exercise ensures that you’re more well-acquainted with your speech and subject, and leaves lesser room for error, thus saving time.

Additionally, if you practice by merely referring to bullet points, chances are you might spend more time beating around the bush while presenting, resulting in time-waste.

6. Watch it:

During your final presentation, do ensure that you have an accurate source of time with you–a wristwatch, clock, smartphone, or even a trusted aide who could signal it for you.

Make sure this source is near you, and in your line of sight, so that you can adhere to it precisely.

7. The Ritual of Being Punctual:

punctuality is essential to ensure no wastage of time.

Be on time. Reach your venue at least 10 minutes before the scheduled time.

Very often, presenters themselves are late, and hence, find themselves in a position where they’re scrambling for time. This may result in the impact of your presentation going downhill.

Plus, this will most definitely cut into the time of the other speakers present.

Punctuality is a sign that you respect the time of your fellow speakers, organizers and most importantly, listeners. This goes a long way.

8. Adapt and React:

presentations require one to be quick on their feet, in case of any changes

The element of uncertainty always exists. You could still find yourself running out of time. Or, the organizers might ask you to speed your presentation due to a venue being booked for a limited time, other delays and/or technical issues.

Nevertheless, there must exist a Plan B. You must immediately be able to adapt to the situation and eliminate the needful.

Yes, your material may be concise, but you must always have a fair idea of what can be eliminated in case a situation like this arises. Consider your audience and approach it from their perspective.

You must be quick on your feet. Don’t let your nerves get the better of you. With adequate prior preparation, one will seamlessly be able to adapt to the situation.

9. The Filler Killer:

We often use filler words such as Um, Well, and Like in our day-to-day conversations.

However, while giving a presentation in a limited timeframe, these filler words may actually end up wasting time and cause you to exceed your given limit. After all, these words are meaningless.

We often use these words due to lack of preparation, nerves or just sheer habit.

Learn how to eliminate its usage through this helpful article.

10. Handy Handouts:

presentation handouts are essential for the whole experience

The experience of an effective PowerPoint presentation is incomplete without handouts.

Handouts are a tangible and printed form of information handed over to your audience.

As a presenter, you may feel restricted, in terms of addressing all essential points for a subject. This is where handouts come in handy.

All required information can be printed on your handout, and these help in creating a lasting impression and impact on your audience.

Here’s all you need to know about presentation handouts.

11. Don’t Stress to Impress:

don't stress yourself while giving a presentation

We get it, public speaking and giving presentations is nerve-wracking. But, we’ve got your back.

Nerves result in the wastage of a lot of time. No matter what the preparation is, your efforts might go in vain due to nerves.

Relax! That’s what you have to do when you’re up next. You can even harness your nervous and vulnerable state of mind, into a powerful tool.

Read this article, in order to do so.

Ideal Length of a Presentation

Speeches and presentations are subjective in nature. There isn’t any universal duration set for your presentation.

This depends on the kind of meeting being held, as well as, your audience.

To help you get a fair idea, here are some examples of the types of speeches and their ideal duration:

TED Talks : A talk can be no longer than 18 minutes, as it is considered to be just the right span of time to hold one’s attention and create a serious impact.
Business Pitch: Should range between 10-18 minutes, but not exceed this limit. It is done so to prevent saturation of information and loss of interest.
Ceremonial Speeches: Should range between 5-10 minutes. These include weddings, graduations, birthdays, and even funerals.
Informative Speaking : Ideal time considered is 10 minutes. Here, the speaker disseminates important information.
Persuasive Speaking : Duration between 2-7 minutes. Here, a speaker tries to convince their audience to agree with their viewpoint.

Again, there is nothing set in stone in terms of time, for these presentations. They wary in nature, size and context.

In some scenarios, one could probably be more flexible with their time; for example– a wedding toast, which isn’t necessarily bound by a restrictive timeframe.

Whereas, in more formal environments such as a business pitch, the 18 minute time limit is adhered to.

Best Time of the Day to Give a Presentation

Yes, that is a thing. If you have the flexibility to schedule your presentation, you should most definitely aim to take the morning slot around 10 AM.

Why? This is because your audience will be fresh, with higher levels of concentration and short-term memory.

10 AM isn’t too early in the day, where your audience might doze off.

If a slot is taken after that, around afternoon, it may coincide with lunch time (which, let’s admit, is very important) and result in your audience being more distracted and restless due to the same.

Post-lunch, too, becomes relatively riskier, as productivity levels do go down in the afternoons, especially after a heavy meal. A large number of people feel tired after a heavy meal, and concentration levels dip.

Of course, in the end, choosing your time depends on your knowledge of your audience. It depends on who they are, what they do, and their working hours.

So do keep these factors in mind while scheduling your next presentation!

Putting Power in your Point: Tips & Tricks

Now, keeping time isn’t necessarily limited to just your speech. The presentation you make must also be accurate and clear.

Here are a few hacks you could use to up your PowerPoint game.

1. Simplicity’s the Key:

KISS . Keep it simple, stupid!

If you want to save time while presenting, avoid using ‘fancy’ words or complex explanations; you’re probably going to end up explaining those more than actually presenting, leading to a waste of time. If there’s a simpler route, always go for that.

Limit the number of words per line, and throughout your presentation. Just about 6-8 words per line, and keep a close eye on the number of slides.

2. Display Matter that Matters:

Make it a point to present only essential information. The explanation is to be done by the speaker.

Hence, just put in the required keywords in bullet points, and explain them accordingly.

Quite often, presenters make large bullet points with the whole text, and end up reading those verbatim instead. This must be avoided.

Follow the 6 x 6 rule for bullet points , which states no more than 6 words per point, and no more than 6 points per slide.

3. Limit your Slides:

Ensure that you don’t have too many slides, which may result in exceeding the time limit.

Time your presentation accordingly, with reference to the one slide per minute rule.

4. ‘Builds’ Could Knock you Down :

Build slides are those slides that gradually show you the bullet points so present, as the mouse is clicked.

They are used to add variety, but ever so often, they end up slowing down the presentation.

Avoid using builds repetitively, and use them only where necessary and/or to make a point.

5. Learn to Navigate:

In the course of the presentation, you may be asked to go back and forth your slides, for purposes of reference.

For example, if at Slide 14, you wish to cover a concept so explained on Slide 5, you may end up wasting time going through each of those previous 9 slides. Remember, every second counts.

There are various methods to ensure you reach your desired slide, with the simple click of a button. Read this.

Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 Rule :

It’s pretty simple:

10 Slides — the optimal number 20 Minutes — the optimal duration 30 pts. — minimum font size.

According to Kawasaki, 10 is the adequate number of slides that the human mind can fully interpret and retain. It’s up to the speaker on how he wants to structure his presentation, but the message should be conveyed within those 10 slides.

20 minutes is the time you should allocate for your presentation. Even if you are given a whole 60 minutes for the same, aim to finish in 20 and allocate the remaining 40 minutes to an interactive question/answer session.

30 pts. should be the minimum size of the font you choose. Nothing smaller than that. The idea behind this is that the smaller the text, the more information is put on the slide. This may be counterproductive to the fact that PowerPoint Presentations are meant to be concise and to-the-point. The explaining is to be done by you.

In Conclusion

Keeping your thoughts, on the dot, may seem like a task, at first. But, now you know, it surely isn’t.

All it requires is prioritization from the presenter’s end. Keep the needs and interests of your audience in mind and respect their time.

Keep time, and don’t let time keep you.

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Chapter 10. Designing and Delivering Presentations

In this chapter.

Strategies for developing professional oral presentations and designing clear, functional slides
Discussion of what makes presentations challenging and practical advice for becoming a more engaging and effective presenter
Tips for extending the concepts of high quality presentations to creating videos and posters

Presentations are one of the most visible forms of professional or technical communication you will have to do in your career. Because of that and the nature of being put “on the spot,” presentations are often high pressure situations that make many people anxious. As with the other forms of communication described in this guide, the ability to present well is a skill that can be practiced and honed.

When we think of presentations, we typically imagine standing in front of a room (or auditorium) full of people, delivering information verbally with slides projected on a screen. Variations of that scene are common. Keep in mind, though, that the skills that make you a strong presenter in that setting are incredibly valuable in many other situations, and they are worth studying and practicing.

Effective presentation skills are the ability to use your voice confidently to communicate in “live” situations—delivering information verbally and “physically,” being able to engage your audience, and thinking on your feet. It also translates to things like videos, which are a more and more common form of communication in professional spheres. You will have a number of opportunities during your academic career to practice your presentation skills, and it is worth it to put effort into developing these skills. They will serve you well in myriad situations beyond traditional presentations, such as interviews, meetings, networking, and public relations.

This chapter describes best practices and tips for becoming an effective presenter in the traditional sense, and also describes how best practices for presentation skills and visuals apply to creating videos and posters.

Process for Planning, Organizing, and Writing Presentations

Similar to any other piece of writing or communication, to design a successful presentation, you must follow a thoughtful writing process (see Engineering Your Writing Process ) that includes planning, drafting, and getting feedback on the presentation content, visuals, and delivery (more on that in the following section).Following is a simple and comprehensive way to approach “writing” a presentation:

Step 1: Identify and state the purpose of the presentation. Find focus by being able to clearly and simply articulate the goal of the presentation—what are you trying to achieve? This is helpful for you and your audience—you will use it in your introduction and conclusion, and it will help you draft the rest of the presentation content.

Step 2: Outline major sections. Next, break the presentation content into sections. Visualizing sections will also help you assess organization and consider transitions from one idea to the next. Plan for an introduction, main content sections that help you achieve the purpose of the presentation, and a conclusion.

Step 3: Draft content. Once you have an outline, it’s time to fill in the details and plan what you are actually going to say. Include an introduction that gives you a chance to greet the audience, state the purpose of the presentation, and provide a brief overview of the rest of the presentation (e.g. “First, we will describe the results of our study, then we’ll outline our recommendations and take your questions”). Help your audience follow the main content of the presentation by telling them as you move from one section of your outline to the next—use the structure you created to keep yourself and your audience on track.

End with a summary, restating the main ideas (purpose) from the presentation and concluding the presentation smoothly (typically thanking your audience and offering to answering any questions from your audience). Ending a presentation can be tricky, but it’s important because it will make a lasting impression with your audience—don’t neglect to plan out the conclusion carefully.

Step 4: Write presentation notes. For a more effective presentation style, write key ideas, data, and information as lists and notes (not a complete, word-for-word script). This allows you to ensure you are including all the vital information without getting stuck reading a script. Your presentation notes should allow you to look down, quickly reference important information or reminders, and then look back up at your audience.

Step 5: Design supporting visuals. Now it’s time to consider what types of visuals will best help your audience understand the information in your presentation. Typically, presentations include a title slide, an overview or advance organizer, visual support for each major content section, and a conclusion slide. Use the visuals to reinforce the organization of your presentation and help your audience see the information in new ways.

Don’t just put your notes on the slides or use visuals that will be overwhelming or distracting—your audience doesn’t need to read everything you’re saying, they need help focusing on and really understanding the most important information. See Designing Effective Visuals .

At each step of the way, assess audience and purpose and let them affect the tone and style of your presentation. What does your audience already know? What do you want them to remember or do with the information? Use the introduction and conclusion in particular to make that clear.

For in-class presentations, look at the assignment or ask the instructor to make sure you’re clear on who your audience is supposed to be. As with written assignments, you may be asked to address an imagined audience or design a presentation for a specific situation, not the real people who might be in the room.

In summary, successful presentations

have a stated purpose and focus;
are clearly organized, with a beginning, middle, and end;
guide the audience from one idea to the next, clearly explaining how ideas are connected and building on the previous section; and
provide multiple ways for the audience to absorb the most important information (aurally and visually).

Developing a Strong Presentation Style

Since presentation are delivered to the audience “live,” review and revise it as a verbal and visual presentation, not as a piece of writing. As part of the “writing” process, give yourself time to practice delivering your presentation out loud with the visuals . This might mean practicing in front of a mirror or asking someone else to listen to your presentation and give you feedback (or both!). Even if you have a solid plan for the presentation and a strong script, unexpected things will happen when you actually say the words—timing will feel different, you will find transitions that need to be smoothed out, slides will need to be moved.

More importantly, you will be better able to reach your audience if you are able to look up from your notes and really talk to them—this will take practice.

Characteristics of a Strong Presentation Style

When it comes time to practice delivery, think about what has made a presentation and a presenter more or less effective in your past experiences in the audience. What presenters impressed you? Or bored you? What types of presentation visuals keep your attention? Or are more useful?

One of the keys to an effective presentation is to keep your audience focused on what matters—the information—and avoid distracting them or losing their attention with things like overly complicated visuals, monotone delivery, or disinterested body language.

As a presenter, you must also bring your own energy and show the audience that you are interested in the topic—nothing is more boring than a bored presenter, and if your audience is bored, you will not be successful in delivering your message.

Verbal communication should be clear and easy to listen to; non-verbal communication (or body language) should be natural and not distracting to your audience. The chart below outlines qualities of both verbal and non-verbal communication that impact presentation style. Use it as a sort of “rubric” as you assess and practice your own presentation skills.

As you plan and practice a presentation, be aware of time constraints. If you are given a time limit (say, 15 minutes to deliver a presentation in class or 30 minutes for a conference presentation), respect that time limit and plan the right amount of content. As mentioned above, timing must be practiced “live”—without timing yourself, it’s difficult to know how long a presentation will actually take to deliver.

Finally, remember that presentations are “live” and you need to stay alert and flexible to deal with the unexpected:

Check in with your audience. Ask questions to make sure everything is working (“Can everyone hear me ok?” or “Can you see the screen if I stand here?”) and be willing to adapt to fix any issues.
Don’t get so locked into a script that you can’t improvise. You might need to respond to a question, take more time to explain a concept if you see that you’re losing your audience, or move through a planned section more quickly for the sake of time. Have a plan and be able to underscore the main purpose and message of your presentation clearly, even if you end up deviating from the plan.
Expect technical difficulties. Presentation equipment fails all the time—the slide advancer won’t work, your laptop won’t connect to the podium, a video won’t play, etc. Obviously, you should do everything you can to avoid this by checking and planning, but if it does, stay calm, try to fix it, and be willing to adjust your plans. You might need to manually advance slides or speak louder to compensate for a faulty microphone. Also, have multiple ways to access your presentation visuals (e.g., opening Google Slides from another machine or having a flash drive).

Developing Strong Group Presentations

Group presentations come with unique challenges. You might be a confident presenter individually, but as a member of a group, you are dealing with different presentation styles and levels of comfort.

Here are some techniques and things to consider to help groups work through the planning and practicing process together:

Transitions and hand-off points. Be conscious of and plan for smooth transitions between group members as one person takes over the presentation from another. Awkward or abrupt transitions can become distracting for an audience, so help them shift their attention from one speaker to the next. You can acknowledge the person who is speaking next (“I’ll hand it over to Sam who will tell you about the results”) or the person who’s stepping in can acknowledge the previous speaker (“So, I will build on what you just heard and explain our findings in more detail”). Don’t spend too much time on transitions—that can also become distracting. Work to make them smooth and natural.
Table reads. When the presentation is outlined and written, sit around a table together and talk through the presentation—actually say what you will say during the presentation, but in a more casual way. This will help you check the real timing (keep an eye on the clock) and work through transitions and hand-off points. (Table reads are what actors do with scripts as part of the rehearsal process.)
Body language. Remember that you are still part of the presentation even when you’re not speaking. Consider non-verbal communication cues—pay attention to your fellow group members, don’t block the visuals, and look alert and interested.

Designing Effective Visuals

Presentation visuals (typically slides, but could be videos, props, handouts, etc.) help presenters reinforce important information by giving the audience a way to see as well as hear the message. As with all other aspects of presentations, the goal of visuals is to aid your audience’s understanding, not overwhelm or distract them. One of the most common ways visuals get distracting is by using too much text. Plan and select visuals aids carefully—don’t just put your notes on the screen, but use the visuals to reinforce important information and explain difficult concepts.

The slides below outline useful strategies for designing professional, effective presentation slides.

Write concise text. Minimize the amount of reading you ask your audience to do by using only meaningful keywords, essential data and information, and short phrases. Long blocks of text or full paragraphs are almost never useful.
Use meaningful titles. The title should reveal the purpose of the slide. Its position on the slide is highly visible—use it to make a claim or assertion, identify the specific focus of the slide, or ask a framing question.
Use images and graphics. Wherever possible, replace wordy descriptions with visuals. Well chosen images and graphics will add another dimension to the message you are trying to communicate. Make sure images are clear and large enough for your audience to see and understand in the context of the presentation.
Keep design consistent. The visual style of the slides should be cohesive. Use the same fonts, colors, borders, backgrounds for similar items (e.g., all titles should be styled the same way, all photos should have the same size and color border). This does not mean every slide needs to look identical, but they should be a recognizable set.
Use appropriate contrast. Pay attention to how easy it is to see elements on the screen. Whatever colors you choose, backgrounds and overlaid text need to be some version of light/dark. Avoid positioning text over a patterned or “busy” background—it is easy for the text to get lost and become unreadable. Know that what looks ok on your computer screen might not be as clear when projected.

Key Takeaway

Create a structure for your presentation or video that clearly supports your goal.
Practice effective verbal and non-verbal communication to become comfortable with your content and timing. If you are presenting as a group, practice together.
Use visuals that support your message without distracting your audience.

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5 secrets to sticking on time in your business presentations

Hanieh Vidmar | 24 September 2018 | 6 years ago 0 0 0

You show respect to your audience by sticking to the time frame and not underdelivering or going over the allotted time.
If you’re amongst other speakers you respect them and the event organisers by sticking to the time frame and allowing the event to run as per schedule.
And thirdly, by sticking to your time and having a presentation planned for that time you don’t risk stressing out, panicking and worrying about whether you have enough time left to finish, if you have too much time left when you’re about to finish or you’ve gone over and you still have a long way to go.

Before you plan your presentation, know how much time you have to speak

Organise a schedule, rehearse against the clock, monitor your progress.

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For Business Presentations, Time Constraints Are Usually

For business presentations, time constraints are usually

A) rigid, permitting little or no flexibility. B) meaningless-audiences expect presenters to take a little more time than they're allotted. C) imposed only on lower-level employees. D) not important if you are presenting to your colleagues.

Correct Answer:

Q2: If you need to design a venue

Q3: When you prepare a speech or presentation,

Q4: When you're speaking to an international audience,

Q5: To reduce the formality of an oral

Q6: The best way to clarify your main

Q7: You want to prepare a speaking outline

Q8: When you're introducing a presentation, include a

Q9: Selecting the right medium for your presentation

Q10: When using conventional structured slides, try to

Q11: Speeches and oral presentations are much like

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