Comment by ethomson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ethomson | Hacker News Reader

On the whole, this is excellent advice. The introduction is completely true for me: I give many talks every year and it is, without question, a _lot_ of work. I suspect that everybody is a bit different as to how they prepare, but like the author, I do the cold rehearsal in my hotel room a half-dozen times (at least) before I actually go to give the talk.

I also break my talk into logical chunks - say five or six sections. I practice each of those individually, timing them. This gives me an average for how long each section takes, so I have a schedule written down. This lets me know how far over or under my time allotment I am so that I can adjust on the fly, either adding some additional explanation to some areas or subtly truncating something.

I always know my "bail out" slide - if I end up running out of time, what's the "thank you!" slide number? If you simply type in that slide number in PowerPoint or Keynote, it will jump to that slide without fanfare. Don't ever tell your audience that you ran out of time to get to all your material, or flip through the slides to the end that they won't get to see. They'll feel like they were ripped off. (Also, make sure to structure your talk so that the special bonus material is at the end, so they're _not_ actually ripped off.)

Interesting, I didn't know you can type the slide number.

Anyway, no need to remember the last slide number - just press the End key to jump there.

Some people organize their deck with an end slide and then an "appendix" of backup slides with figures that might be relevant during Q&A but don't really have a role in the flow of your presentation. Of course, they could just have two, duplicate, "Thanks!" slides, one at the logical end of their talk and another at the physical end of their deck...

Or double your first slide as your Thank You slide and use the Home key.

Also, don't underestimate the power of the blank screen (B or period for black, W or comma for white in PowerPoint; press again to return to last slide). If you don't have an action item take away to display it can be an effective "I'm done" and bring focus more directly to you for any concluding remarks (including saying a "Thank You"). (It can also be effective in the middle of a presentation to highlight something you want people to hear from you first rather than read.)

> I do the cold rehearsal in my hotel room a half-dozen times

How do you prevent getting bored? And how do you prevent your audience to notice that you're bored giving the same talk for the Nth time?

These are actually my biggest problems giving presentations.

[author of the linked article here]

I get bored while practicing (and it’s getting worse as I get better) but the audience changes everything for me. In the absence of special talents, plowing through boredom and practice anyway is what separates good talks from mediocre ones.

To quote Dr. J: “Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them.”

You make sure the material is "boring" so that you can concentrate on what the talk is really about: The people in front of you. They change every time, sometimes radically (composition of the audience and context). You want to waste as little conscious thought as possible when it comes to the material you are presenting so that you are free to dedicate yourself to the audience.

How boring does it get for a painter to use the same kinds of brushes for all their paintings? Or for a musician to use the exact same instrument? It doesn't, because they are not what you focus on.

It may get boring to minimally refactor the same code twenty times -- the code is the focus of the action. When giving a talk about the code the focus is what you want to achieve with people, not with code.

If you are there and really only care about the thing you want to present instead of the people in front of you then sure, they will probably notice.

Disclaimer:

This goes along with the other sub-thread here about the value of recording talks. What I say above is more about talks that are about convincing and motivating people. I don't mean that as in "motivational speeches" at all, but an Apple keynote about their new products is in that category. You want to give people a "look behind the scenes", at the person, because technology fails if the people and/or organization(s) fail no matter the quality of the technology. If the talk is about the latest internal optimizations of the V8 Javascript runtime giving the talk once and then point to the recording, or even just a lengthy blog post may actually be better and the main reason there is a talk is "the conference is there anyway and why not". But that's the kind of talk I would put only minimal effort into and it still works, because I don't need to convince and engage people, only to inform them.

Yes, we truly live in the age of useless bullshit. 99/100 talks I've watched from YouTube make me skip through the bullshit and see if there's even a single slide with some interesting content in it.

1.5x and 2x speed on the desktop version of YouTube (and the ability to set playback speed in most media apps) helps with that.

I prefer the (open source) videospeed Chrome extension [0]. It gives me a much wider range (thus far I used up to 5 x speed; audio is blanked above 3 x speedup), 0.1 increments - and keyboard control. The latter is essential to me, I can watch sections of online lectures at high speed and quickly slow down without fumbling for the mouse to watch the few sections that demand more attention at lower speed.

[0] https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed

Desktop YouTube shows a preview when you mouseover on the timeline. You can get through a 1-hour talk in 20 seconds or so with that.

Right, but at 2x you can actually watch the whole thing in half the time. If it's not too technical you can come away with 100% of the information. The more technical or unfamiliar accents the more backups you will need.

Personally, I love speaking and presenting. I'm not bored giving a talk several times, they're different each time, even when you think it'll be the same. Having to compress something down to 30 minutes or extend something to 60 makes a different, plus the things that I've been thinking of that day. I also often try to tie in my talk with a prior talk or with the keynote.

I also don't find the rehearsals boring; in fact, around 24 hours before, I'm already starting to get excited about the upcoming talk. So I'm pretty amped up.

One challenge is multiple talks back-to-back. It's hard to keep that momentum up for several days in a row. I've definitely had occasion to give a great, high-energy talk and then give a talk a day or so later that just feels "off", especially in terms of my energy level.

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