When giving a presentation, it is essential that you do not exceed the time limit.
Whether you’ve set it yourself or agreed to a time limit set by the meeting organizer, you need to prepare so that you can cover your topic within that time limit. Usually no one will complain if you finish a minute early, but the moment you exceed your time limit, people will get restless and impatient.
It is disrespectful to ignore the time limit. If you fast forward ten minutes, what you are really saying to the audience is, “What I have to say is so important that I really don’t care what it is that you are missing as long as you sit here and listen to me.” And that’s not the message you want to send to your audience and it certainly won’t help you keep their attention.
(Yes, the situation is different if you are conducting a discussion, negotiation, or brainstorming session where everyone decides that more time is needed. But what I am talking about here is a presentation where you have a quantity fixed time and a fixed amount of information to transmit within that time limit).
Practice
The best way to determine how long it will take to deliver your content is to practice the delivery and time yourself, especially if this is your first time giving this presentation.
There is no magic formula for how long it takes to present a certain number of slides. It depends on how much information is on the slides, how long it takes you to explain it, and whether you answer questions during the presentation or at the end. I have seen people spend an hour on a slide. I’ve also seen them deliver twenty slides in three minutes.
Cut what you don’t need
Focus on what your audience needs to know, rather than everything you can tell them. Delete everything that is not related to your message. If you don’t support or help your audience understand your message, delete it.
Keep additional material in your notes in case you have any questions about it. You can also send it to people before or after your presentation, but don’t clutter your presentation with extraneous information that wastes time.
This is a difficult part of the process, especially if you are an expert in your field. There is so much you can say and want to share, but you don’t have time. So you need to be careful when choosing which facts, stories, examples, data to share and which ones not.
Recognize that you are not covering everything
During your presentation, you can say “for the sake of time, I will not go into detail [on the design of this experiment, the process by which gathered this data, etc.]. If you’re interested, we’ll see you later and I’ll share it with you. “
If you stay within your time limit when you are presenting, the audience is more likely to pay attention and remember your message.
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