Give Yourself Enough Time For Preparation
- peterbonate
- Jan 30
- 4 min read
A while ago, I did a webinar with Stacey Tannenbaum for Certara on giving virtual presentations (1). Afterwards, Certara started a blog about the presentation and a question came in, “…what might be a typical time it takes to prepare a well delivered presentation. This is from when you start making presentation slides, adding different features to engage the audience, practicing and editing/fine-tuning the finished slide deck.” (2) That’s a good question, one that is rarely addressed, and one that is quite timely because as I am writing this I have hanging over my head a presentation for which I haven’t even started preparing yet.
And here’s the answer: it depends. There isn’t a hard and fast rule here because it depends on many factors like how well you know the material, how much of the material for the presentation is already made, and how much time you need to practice. Working backwards, I personally plan for 5 to 7-times the length of the presentation for practice. If the presentation is for an hour I will practice 5 to 7 hours. For important presentations I will practice more, a lot more. But this is me. You may require more time, or less time, depending on how comfortable you are with your talk. Practicing your talk should take as much, if not probably more, of your time compared to any other task.
You should practice until you feel relaxed presenting the material from any point in your presentation. Most people practice starting from the beginning of their talk. Towards the end they may be tired or not as focused as when they started, particularly for longer presentations. Hence, the closing of a talk tends to not be a strong as the opening. Instead, try practicing another way. Once you have practiced from the beginning a few times, try starting from the middle or any random place in your slide deck. Things happen during a presentation. Questions may arise. Technical problems may ensue. These may stop the flow of your presentation and when you restart you may be bit flummoxed about where you left off and what you meant to say. Practicing from random spots not only helps you stave off these hiccups, but gives you an added level of confidence that you can conquer anything during your talk. That’s the feeling you want when you walk out on that stage or start talking. There’s a phrase for this, and that’s knowing it cold. You want to know your material cold, no matter how long that takes you to achieve.
A more difficult estimate is the amount of time it takes to create a polished slide deck. This starts with planning. What do you want to say? What is the point of your talk? If the audience leaves with remembering just one thing from your talk, what is that one thing you want them to remember? Planning your talk will help you save time later when you put your slide deck together. I would say that you should plan at least as long as your talk for what you will say and what you will show.
Someone, I forget who, said it takes 20 to 30 min to create a “good” slide. That’s probably about right on-average for a complicated slide with graphics, but is on the high side for textual slides. For a 1-hour talk, where you have ~1 slide per minute, then I would say it should take about 1o to 20 hours to prepare those slides. For a 10 min talk to a core team for a project-related talk then about an hour or two is needed.
The original question asked about prep time from conception to presentation, but they forgot one important part, and that is afterwards. You should always get feedback afterwards from your audience on how you did. I’m not talking about platitudes about how great you were. I’m talking about constructive feedback to help you prepare for next time. Good feedback is a gift (if your ego can take it and listen because sometimes feedback can be brutal). Maybe you like to create certain graphs that you think look cool, but in reality, don’t help the audience understand what you are trying to convey. Getting that as feedback will help the audience during your next presentation.
So, what do all these numbers add up to? For a 1-hour talk of high importance it should take about 30 to 35 hours of preparation starting from scratch. However, the exact numbers are not that important. What matters is that you give yourself enough time to prepare, however long that is. This means that you should not procrastinate and wait till the last minute. I can’t tell you how many horrible presentations I’ve sat through that seemed as though they were slapped together at the last minute by the speaker. Don’t be that person. Be the polished speaker. Be the speaker that when your name is introduced, the audience knows that they are in for a treat. They know that you will have put the time in to give them a quality presentation and that you won’t be wasting their time.
(1) https://www.certara.com/webinar-archive/
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