Powerpoint is NOT a teleprompter!

<rant>

Frankly, I don’t like long meetings and briefings. For me personally, “time well spent” in these settings mostly ranges between 0 to 10 percent of the total time I have to sit there. Company-wide briefings/presentations are the worst, where a large number of people gather in a room to listen to the presenters for a long period of time. They are flat out boring mostly but at times a good way to get everyone’s attention at the same time.

My biggest issue lies with how these presentations are done. I am seeing this emerging pattern lately where the presenter puts up a powerpoint presentation and literally just reads it out to everyone. I am sorry but powerpoint presentations weren’t meant to be used as teleprompters.

Firstly, the presenter could have emailed me that presentation. I could have read all that in my own time instead of having to put a stop to everything else and coming in for this presentation.

More importantly, with this approach, the presenter becomes irrelevant. I am not listening at all, I am just reading. By the time the presenter is done reading out loud the first line on the screen, I have already finished reading the entire slide. There is no surprise for me, nothing to look forward to, now I am just sitting there, bored and fuming.

I am no expert but if you are one of those presenters, here are $0.02:

— Send the wordy document around in email. Compress the briefing by turning into an interactive and engaging Q&A session.

— Use powerpoint mostly (even exclusively) for visual elements like graphs and pictures.

— Write your spiel on a piece of paper/tablet/phone. Don’t let me see what you are going to say next.

— Talk to me, don’t read things out to me. It’s inefficient, ineffective and boring.

Let us all try and make these meetings and briefings less painful and a bit more efficient. Pretty please?

</rant>