The rectangle behind you

Skip slides and bonus slides

Skip slides

It’s hard to time your talks. If you practice timing too much, you become a robot. If you don’t, you run the risk of running over alloted time and/or needing to cut your talk short.

The first alternative is unkind to your audience or conference organizers. The second alternative is unkind to you — you probably worked hard on making your talk a narrative, with the beginning and the end, and having to rush the finale robs you of an opportunity to wrap things neatly and leave the audience with a very specific message in mind.

Here’s something I sometimes do to help with that: I designate some slides to be skip slides — “nice to haves” that I could omit if it looks like I’m running late.

For example, at one of my recent talks, I had a little interlude about the font I used in the presentation, where it came from, and why I liked it. Was it fun and interesting? I thought it was. Was it crucial? Not at all.

This was a prime candidate for a set of slides to skip. However, I didn’t want to just advance quickly through slides, which always seems very unprofessional. It also disorients the audience and make them think they’re missing out on something.

Instead, I marked the slides as skippable in CSS. Then, in my custom-made presentation engine, I could press a secret key to switch the presentation into an I’m-running-out-of-time mode. Then, when I advanced a slide marked skippable, the presentation just quietly moved to the next one after that.

That’s it. It was literally a few lines of code. And the beauty of this solution? No one knew any better. I didn’t awkwardly skip through slides, making the audience anxious and disappointed. And, I could breathe a bit more easily, knowing I had a little backup plan.

It’s kind of like having a cheat sheet with you during the exam… you might never use it, but having one makes you more at ease.

Bonus slides

This is the opposite approach, used when your talk ends in a Q&A session.

Remember those scenes in The West Wing when the president and his staff would meet in the situation room, and there was a guy whose job was to show, on the big screens around, the information people happened to be talking about? It was magical.

Well, you can be both that guy and the president, at once.

Imagine how good you look when someone in the audience asks you a question, and you’re not just ready with a good answer. You’re ready with some good content.

Of course, you need to prepare for it. Think about what people might ask you about. Then, add some slides after your main talk. Or pre-open some tabs in your browser. Or put some images on your desktop.

It could be slides you once had, but removed for time. And, it helps if you’ve talked about a subject before and you can re-use some older slides or materials.

I’ve only done it a few times, but it was great. (Below is a table of contents for a list of “overflow” bonus slides for a talk I gave in SXSW.)

The rectangle behind you, a series of articles about interactive presentations.

By Marcin Wichary (@mwichary)