I recently gave a newly-developed presentation for the first time, and I was concerned that I had too much material to fit everything in. I was going to be giving this presentation at work, and it was supposed to fit in people’s lunch hour, so it was particularly important that I get the timing right. To be sure I got everything to fit, I developed a “presentation timing card” for myself.

To start, I opened a spreadsheet and listed out all the major sections of the presentation. For each one, I went back through my slides for that section and came up with an estimate of how long I thought I’d need to cover each. I wrote that down next to the name of the section.

Next, I used the spreadsheet to sum up all the estimates. No surprise, I was way over the time I actually had. So, I went back through each section, and adjusted the timings to deliberately allocate the number of minutes I actually had across all of them. There was no way to avoid having less time than I thought I’d want to have in each section, but it forced me to make some careful choices about what was really important to cover at what depth.

Now that I had some realistic numbers, I added two more columns to the spreadsheet: the times I should start and stop each section. The first one’s start time was just the beginning of the talk. Each end was just the start time plus the duration I’d assigned. Each subsequent beginning was really just the end of the previous section.

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Having finished with the spreadsheet, I printed it out so that it just about fit on a playing card. When I actually gave the presentation, I propped the card up where I could keep at eye on it as I went along. I was surprised and very pleased with how easy it became to hit the right pace for each section. Even with two exercises for the audience and random questions throughout, I was able to finish each of three presentations of the material a few minutes before the end of the session. I will definitely be using this technique again!