What are other common timewasters that I can avoid when preparing for my presentation?

Jan 17, 2010

What are other common timewasters that I can avoid when preparing for my presentation?

The following is an excerpt from my upcoming book “How To Give a Pretty Good Presentation” (Wiley 2010)

Giving presentations is in some ways very similar to managing your personal finances and losing lots of weight—there is tons of bad advice out there and anyone can have an opinion!
I’ve tried to gather all the advice that, if followed, would waste lots of your valuable time.
The following are instructions that you will NOT have to follow because they are either bad advice in general for all presenters or bad advice for you in particular to your goals of giving a pretty good presentation:
• Memorize the first minute of your presentation.
o This is tough to do and isn’t worth the effort. It’s a great way to create stage fright and panic.
• Practice your presentation while looking at yourself in a mirror.
o A waste of time. Guaranteed to make you obsess over your crooked nose or receding hairline. The one thing you don’t have to do when giving a speech is look at yourself.
• Visualize your audience naked.
o Terrible advice. Depending on your audience, this is either too disgusting or too distracting.
• Limit your PowerPoint to no more than 10 slides.
o More than 10 slides won’t necessarily help you, but in the real world, people who use this artificial constraint of 10 end up cramming 4 slides worth of content onto one slide. Nobody can read it!
• Write out your entire speech word for word.
o There is no need to do this—just have a simple one-page outline using bullet points.
• Obsess over the size and color of your PowerPoint font
o Generally, a complete waste of time.
• Worry about moving your hands.
o Actually, you should move your hands when you talk. Only nervous people freeze or hold their hands when they speak.
• Cramming every single fact, number and data point on what you and your department have done in the last six months into your presentation.
o If the people you are presenting to really had to know every single thing you do, then they’d have your job. It’s your job to tell them only what’s truly important to them.
• Brainstorm on every single possible question that could be asked by an audience member.
o Sure you need to be able to answer most questions, but there are an infinite number of questions that could be asked. It’s a waste of time to worry about hypothetical questions when the bigger danger is that you haven’t prepared anything interesting or memorable to present in the first place.
• Worry about the sound of your voice.
o Nobody cares or notices your voice. As long as you can be heard and understood then it is highly unlikely that your voice is a problem you should concern yourself with. Besides, there is nothing you can do (easily) about your voice!
• Obsess over special effects, dissolves, and builds in your PowerPoint.
o Even if people notice your special effects they won’t relate it to the messages of your presentation. Special effects usually become a big black-hole time drain. Far better to spend your time preparing something interesting to say.
o
• Put off giving your presentation until you are more seasoned or experienced.
o Quit conning yourself. Giving presentations is makes a person seasoned and experienced.
• Gathering more and more research.
o Enough already. Chances are you already have enough research and raw facts. The longer you stay stuck in the mode of gathering data, the less time you have for processing the data, shaping the data, highlighting the data, preparing stories about the data, and rehearsing your presentations.
• Using a thesaurus to find big words.
o This is great if you want to look like a pompous fool. Use the simplest, shortest word you can think of.
• Anything that takes you away from focusing on a handful of key points with examples and stories to make each point come alive and delivered in a conversational manner.
o Everything else is BS!