Devoting time to preparing a presentation is worth it. Here are four reasons:
1. The audience’s time
Balance the time that you will spend planning the presentation against the time of the people in your audience. Say you’re presenting to 10 people for 40 minutes. That’s 400 minutes of people’s time – 6.6 hours. Isn’t it worth spending a few hours to ensure that 6.6. hours of people’s time is not going to be wasted?
2. The impact you can make
You may be able to “get away” with winging it ie: possibly nobody will come and tell you that it was a long-winded ramble that went nowhere, but you won’t achieve anything. By spending time on the planning of your presentation, you will make a big difference to the impact that you can have.
3. You’ll feel more confident
If you have put time into preparing valuable information for your audience, you’ll feel more confident. It won’t make nervousness go away entirely, but think of how much worse you would feel if you hadn’t put any time into preparing.
4. You’ll be more engaging as a speaker
Many people think that being engaging as a speaker is about your delivery style. Yes and no. Being engaging starts with preparing engaging content. It’s difficult to present a shopping list of facts in an engaging way. Whereas having stories, anecdotes and metaphors make it easy for you to be engaging.
So devoting time to preparing your presentation is worthwhile. But, it’s also possible to waste time when you’re preparing a presentation by planning in inefficient ways. In my next post, I’ll give you my seven time-saving tips.
