The Surest Way to Turn Your Audience Against You: A Critical Mistake Even Effective Speakers Make

Even the most effective speakers will lose their audience if they don't master the art of staying on time during presentations. Going over the allotted time not only diminishes your credibility but also shifts the audience’s focus from your message to your mistakes. By building your presentation around a clear point, you can streamline your content, avoid rushing, and leave a lasting impact.

“We count up the faults of those who keep us waiting.” I first came across this proverb in my late twenties, and over the course of my life I have confirmed its verity through observation. When you delay someone or make them wait, they involuntarily start noticing other “bad” qualities that you have—suddenly every personal trait, every item of clothing, every gesture becomes a potential target for criticism. If you are standing at a bank teller window, and the people making these negative judgments about you are strangers waiting in line, you may never be the wiser. But if you are making a presentation to a group of people, presumably you would prefer they were listening to what you are saying, not tallying up your personal defects.

And yet time and again I see presenters bring this on themselves by letting a talk run over its alloted time. It makes no difference how good the rest of the talk was. That advertised end time is like a tripwire: once a speaker has crossed it, audience response quickly deteriorates from wanting to know more to wanting to get the hell out of there. Their overall opinion of the presentation begins to plummet, no matter how good it was up to that point. As one published expert in the presentations field put it, “Nothing says Amateur Hour more than a presentation that runs over its allotted time.”

Announcing that a presentation will occur from “6-8pm” is a kind of promise to a public most of whom grew up in environments where “when the bell rings, class is over.” At 8pm, that early conditioning kicks in and that audience expects to be set free. Actually, what they expect is for you to have prepared yourself to be done when the bell rings.

Many if not most presenters are at least subconsciously aware of the importance of this deadline effect. This is evidenced by their attempts to avoid it by rushing through the last portion of their talk, and “these last few slides.” Rushing, however, does not really solve the problem. It might nominally avoid going over a time limit, but it has its own detrimental effects on the quality and the perception of the presentation.

Rushing makes you seem unprepared; like you misjudged the amount of material you had or the time it would take you to present it. Which you probably did, else you would not be rushing. Rushing forces you to skip over material in your presentation. If you can skip material, why was it there in the first place? Rushing forces you to abandon the logical thread of your presentation (and your presentation DOES have a logical thread, doesn’t it?) and lose your focus. This deprives the material you did prepare of whatever impact it might otherwise have had. And rushing almost always occurs at the end, when the emphasis should be on sticking the landing. Imagine a gymnast putting in a stellar performance on the uneven bars (my favorite), but then simply dropping ungracefully to the mat and rushing off to another appointment. Considerably less satisfying, no?

So let’s talk about some elements of preparation that avoid these unpleasant situations with audiences:

Have an organizing principle. What point is this presentation trying to make? If the answer is “To share information about X with the audience,” you are going to have a problem: where do you draw the line? What to include, what to leave out? The decision will be arbitrary, and will reliably tend toward including too much. Better to know what point you are trying to make (and to be trying to make a point). That will allow you to discriminate between information you need to include—to support the point—and information you can exclude—because although interesting, it is not required to make the point. The power of having an organizing principle is hard to overestimate. Asking yourself “How do I make this point within the time alloted?” is a much more useful organizing principle than “How much can I cram into the time allotted?” Decide what your point is and build your presentation around that. Know the landing you want to stick, and plan to get there with time to spare.

Assume you have too many slides. If a talk runs over its time, the main cause, more often than not, is too many slides. And many presenters are not presenting often enough to recognize “too many” on sight. They know all the information they “want to get across,” but they don’t know that the number of slides it has taken them to get it all down is simply too many. Experience makes us a better judge of this, but the only surefire way to make sure we have not paved our way into overtime is to: practice the presentation. Run through the script, using all the slides, at a relaxed pace, and see how long it takes. See? Too many slides.

Get rid of dense, information-packed slides. The rule of thumb here is: if a viewer could not comfortably take in the message of the slide from a billboard while traveling at freeway speeds, the slide is too dense or too complicated or both. No amount of slick, colorful graphics can make this problem go away. Remove or redesign the slide. That kind of information density belongs in a handout, not on a screen.

Have a script. The point of a presentation is not to “get through the slides”; the point of a presentation is to make a point. Making a point implies a logical argument. A logical argument implies a premise or proposition and a sequence of statements that support that proposition. Before creating a single slide, you should know what your argument is and know the sequence of statements that support it. This is your script; the scaffolding on which you build your presentation and your slides. Having a script means knowing what to practice when you test your presentation for length—if you have no script, you have no way of knowing that you will reliably reach the end of your talk before you reach the end of your time. It does not mean memorizing, but it does mean knowing the beats of your own talk.

Practice. Did I mention practice? Ultimately, practicing your presentation multiple times is the most reliable way to guarantee you can make it to the end on time. You should practice until you know you can hit the timing mark comfortably, without rushing. Practice tells you where you tend to go off track, where your slides interfere with a smooth flow, what takes too long to get through, where you need more. It’s the only way, really. Practicing in your head just will not cut it. You can “practice” by actually giving the same presentation multiple times, but you will likely burn a lot of audiences in the process. Just assume that no matter how well you think you know the material, you are going to go through it in real time multiple times before going through it the first time for real.

This may all seem like a lot of work. What’s an extra few minutes overtime, after all? But consider the damage that can be done—to your argument, to the quality of your presentation, to your reputation as a “good” speaker—in just those few minutes. Seen in that light, “all this work” starts to look less like a burden and more like an investment in greater satisfaction for both the audience and the speaker.