How To Keep Your Presentation On Time

Now, one of the first important lessons that I learned as a speaker, was time management was more than just a good habit, but time management is really the responsibility of every speaker who has to present a speech or presentation. Now, the additional 2 to 3 minutes that you add to your speech may end up to snowball and become 30 minutes at the end of the event timing or event program as well and that is something you would want to avoid. So here are some very simple tips on how you can try and keep your presentations on time.

First, what you can do is to carry out time practices for your speech or presentation. Now while this is an obvious point, we realised that a lot of our students don’t actually know how long their speech or presentation is timed or how long it will take for the whole speech or presentation itself. Now a time practice doesn’t just mean that your entire speech should cover the full allocated time. So what I mean by this is that, if your allocated time is 5 minutes, it doesn’t mean your entire speech from start to finish has to be 5 minutes. What you need to add are allowances for things like applause for example, for the audience and entertainment. Or for example, pauses or when the audience is laughing, or even including the actual pace that you will be presenting in, in the actual speech or presentation itself and all this will ensure that your time practice is an accurate measure of how long your speech will take.

Now second, prepare about a one-point statement or something I refer to as a last resort statement itself. Now after you have drafted or prepared your full script or speech, what you should do is to run through that script and to identify in one or two sentences, what are your main points in that speech. The purpose of this exercise is two-fold. First, you will be able to know what are the areas that you have not covered when you are delivering your speech and you realise that you are running out of time. And second, with your last resort statements, you can just deliver those statements directly and you are able to deliver very succinctly the main remaining main points of your speech itself. For example, you can even add transition phrases as you use your last resort statement. So for example, “Ladies and gentlemen, I realised I’m running out of time by a little. For the last two minutes, what I would do is I will just give you two very quick statements for the remaining points of my speech and that will then conclude my speech for today ”. So, what you do is just use your last resort statement, last resort meaning you should try and avoid it until the last resort, right and then you can deliver your main points to your audience or to whoever is watching your presentation or your speech itself.

Now finally, I usually prepare something called Jettison Packs. Now, just like how an aeroplane which is running out of fuel, may end up jettison some of their cargo, so that they are able to last a bit longer in the air, a speaker may also be able to do that by cutting out the portions in which that you can make do without for your speech. So for example, a certain story that may be a bit too long, or one or two quotations that don’t really add a bit more substance to what is it you are trying to say in the main point of your speech itself. So what it does is that it actually gives you an extra minute or one or two more minutes to round up your speech or to summarise your speech itself. You are, in a sense, trimming the fat off your speech so that the audience can focus on the meat of your message itself.

Now, overall always remember that the best cure is still prevention. Try to avoid placing yourself in a situation where you are running out of time and you end up having to rush the last part of the speech because that won’t look very good and that won’t look very professional for your audience members itself.