Dividing Up Your Time

Once you’re thinking of the talk as a story, dividing up your time becomes important. Now you work out what you’ve actually got time to say, and this is where your slot length really matters.

Here’s a starting point. Say you’ve got a fairly standard thirty-minute slot. Give roughly 10% to your intro (about three minutes) and 10% to your conclusion (about three minutes), which leaves you around 24 minutes in the middle to tell the story you want to tell.

Keeping that budget in mind as you develop the talk matters, because you want to create enough to fill the time, but not too much, and not too little. By the time you reach the end of your presentation, you want to have landed where you intended.

This is important because it’s easy to get carried away. Sometimes I get stuck into the cool work I’ve done, look at the deck I’ve built, and realise there’s no way I’m covering all of that in the time available, I wasted some time somewhere and now I’m cutting material. Better to keep the budget in mind from the start and work out where your time is going.

10 / 80 / 10 isn’t a bad rule to start with. Once you’ve done a few talks you can vary it, but start there.