ETOOMUCHINFO

Too much info. We’re super passionate about the topics we talk about, we may have spent months or years learning about the thing, and what we come to a talk to do is share it. We want to tell everyone everything we’ve learned. So we pack in as much as we can, because we want to give people value, and we end up with 150 slides to get through in 30 minutes.

Remember how people only remember up to three things from a talk? If you have 150 slides of densely packed technical information and you race through them in half an hour, I guarantee nobody’s going to remember all of it.

You might think, “That’s all well and good, but I really do want to share this info…

That’s what blogs are for. Write a blog. Write a white paper, link people to it at the end of the talk. That way if after your enthralling talk that got them excited about the topic, they want all the details they know where to find them. That’s where the dense technical stuff belongs. There’s a lot of genuinely complex, valuable technical content out there; it’s just a question of how much people can realistically take in during the time you’ve got.