Practice the presentation speedrun

Supercharge your public speaking

To give a successful presentation, you have to have memorized the entire sequence of slides you will be using. At no time should you be confused about what slides come next or what the purpose of a slide is when you pull it up. You probably have seen presentations where the speaker advances to a slide only to appear stumped and confused about why it is there and what the point is. Avoid this situation at all costs.

The most reliable path to a smooth presentation is to give it over and over. Once you have given the same presentation 50 times you will have memorized all its twists and turns and will know exactly which slides come when and why. One problem with this approach though is that you probably want your presentation to be amazing on the first go. You need to be able to show up and deliver an outstanding performance even if you haven't had 49 prior opportunities to present the same material. So what can you do?

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For very important occasions, such as an interview for a job you really want, a keynote at a major conference, or a promotion seminar, you can give practice talks in front of friends and colleagues. I'm a big fan of practice talks, and I would definitely encourage you to take advantage of them whenever you can. However, while your friends and colleagues may be willing to show up once or twice to see you practice, they will likely not want to sit through 49 versions of the same talk. What other options are there to practice a presentation?

I want to propose a very simple exercise that you should do every time you prepare for a presentation. I call it the presentation speedrun. In brief, the goal is to get through your entire slide deck in 3–4 minutes. The exercise is very simple. You pull up the first slide, look at it, and immediately recall what the next slide is in the deck. The moment you can name or visualize the second slide you advance. Then you recall the third slide in the deck, and the moment you can name or visualize it again you advance. You continue in this way through the entire deck, as fast as possible.

The first few times you do this exercise with a new deck of slides, you will notice how you can remember some transitions but keep forgetting others. This is fine. Keep practicing. Eventually you will have memorized the entire deck.

The benefit of presentation speedruns is that they don't take a lot of time, so you can do many rounds. You could instead give complete practice talks to yourself, and I'm not going to dismiss the effectiveness of them (you should do a few for every important presentation), but let's be realistic. You're unlikely to do 20–30 practice rounds of an hour-long talk, as this would require several days of full-time practice. But, you can do 20 speedruns in about an hour. There is absolutely no excuse not to put in this amount of preparation, even for presentations of lesser importance.

As you practice your speedruns, you may notice that some slide transitions are easy to recall while others are not. This is normal. Every presentation has some transitions that are extremely obvious and nearly impossible to forget and others that are a little more difficult and require more care and thought. However, if you repeatedly get stuck at the same point in your slide deck or consistently think the next slide is different from the one that actually follows, then this may indicate a structural problem in your slide sequencing. You may have a break or logical gap in your slides, and you'll be better off fixing the issue than trying to memorize your way around it.

Finally, there’s a slower version of the speedrun that is also worthwhile: For every slide, state the main point in one sentence, and then state the transition sentence to the next slide.¹ Then advance and repeat. This version will likely take 2–3 times longer than the minimal version where you simply recall the next slide and advance. But it trains you to have both concise summary statements for each slide and prepared transition sentences, and the two together carry a presentation. So practice this version also. My recommendation would be to first practice the fast version, 10–20 times, or however long it takes until you have fully memorized your slide deck, and then practice the slow version a few times until you can quickly state the point of each slide and nail all transitions.

1. I hope you have thought about transition sentences. Ideally, for every slide transition, you say a sentence that introduces the next slide before you advance to that slide. This prepares your audience for the transition, and it also gives the impression that you’re fully in command of your presentation and have a carefully thought-out story line.