I’m the kind of person who can talk about topics I love for hours without tiring. Combine that with how readily I lose track of time, and I can easily stretch a 15 minute talk into a half hour… unless I’m careful.
Here’s several tips for staying on pace & not going over time when presenting (for class, at a conference, etc.) from someone who frequently does so despitea poor internal clock:
Practice your talk and time yourself. For bonus points, practice and time each section of your talk separately. Based on the results, edit your talk accordingly.
Have a plan: if you (because of nervous energy, interruptions, magic, whatever) find yourself several minutes behind schedule, what material are you going to cut? Practice this speedy version of your talk too!
Furthermore, memorize the main point of each slide in your presentation. That way if you need to fly through them, you can rapidly convey your primary narrative. In fact, I recommend writing each main point explicitly on each slide, which has the added benefit of making your slides easier to follow on their own.
During the talk, I like to keep a timer going on my phone that I can glance at while speaking; I’ve found this significantly helps me maintain a desired pace. If you go this route, it helps to know at what slide you should be on at specific times.
If worst comes to worst and you find yourself running over, jump to your talk’s thesis statement and thank your audience. Maintaining the overall time schedule is important!
Finally: running over time happens sometimes, and that’s okay! Keep your cool as best you can, and know your talk is still good & valuable.
If you’re interested, these are all tips I originally posted on my Twitter.
“First, I’d like to thank [university / conference / host] for having me, and thank you all for attending my talk. Today I’m presenting work I performed on [general topic] with my collaborators at [university/universities]. To begin, let’s talk about [slide 1 topic].”
