I gave a talk today, and everything went really well until I ran out of time. It didn’t end up being a bad talk. I just ended up speaking a lot faster in the last five minutes than in the first twenty minutes, and rushing through things in the end.
There is no single answer to the question: “How long should I talk for?” Sometimes people want me to squeeze everything into half an hour, including questions, and other times I’m told: “We have the room for three hours. Use as much time as you want.”
So I’m thinking of turning my talk into an accordion talk — a presentation that can shrink and grow to fit the available time. Since I write all my own presentation software, this shouldn’t be too difficult.
The fundamental idea, I’m thinking, is to tag each slide according to how long a talk it would be part of. The most important “tent pole” slides would be in every talk — even the short 15 minute talks.
But other slides would be tagged by “40 minutes” or “60 minutes” — meaning that I should skip over that slide if my talk is supposed to come in at less than 40 or 60 minutes, respectively.
Yes there is still some fuzziness in this. The technique heavily relies on my knowing how long it takes for me to present various given slides.
But I think it would be far better than the sort of guessing that I do now.
This reminds me of my days in news broadcasting a bit. Each item in the broadcast has a “nominal” amount of time that it’s predicted to take to get through, and the producer loads the show to take a nominal 60 minutes. If things are running long, the producer drops the least important segments to fit. Various systems like teleprompters, graphics and video playback are all networked to the producer’s workstation and drop those items from their playlists automatically. At least they do nowadays, back when I was in that business dropping an item meant that everybody on the crew had to go into their paper rundowns and cross things off.
Rather than tagging each slide with how long of a presentation should keep that slide in it, I’d tag each slide with a) how long it takes to get through and b) a “weight” signifying its importance. Every time you advance the slide your software looks at how much time you have left in your presentation and drops slides starting from the lowest weights until the remaining slides come in under your allotted time. This way, if your presentation is running long or short it will dynamically keep or drop slides to keep you on time. Additionally you could record how long it takes you to get through a slide and use that to refine the estimate next time you make that presentation. You could also create alternate branches, where instead of losing information completely when you drop a slide, it instead branches into an alternate set of slides which present that information more succinctly. For example, a series of slides with detailed graphs or charts turn into a single slide with a bunch of bullet points summarizing them.
A lot of potential here, I can’t wait for it to make its way into Powerpoint. =D
Instead of specifying 40 minutes, I can also specify, say, [30,40] minutes, effectively giving a range of when the slide appears: both a minimum and a maximum talk duration. Collapsing of multiple slides into a single slide will occur when a bunch of slides that are tagged as, say,, 40 gets replaced by one that is tagged as, say, [30,40]. When the desired talk duration dips below 30, this slide too will be left out.
The reason I want the “precompiled” approach — as opposed to your excellent on-the-fly approach — is that by the time I get up in front of a group of people to give a talk, I would prefer to already know the sequence of slides, so I can optimize my presentation for that particular sequence of slides. There are themes that recur throughout different times in a talk, and I want to make sure they get added/dropped together. The way I was planning to use this was to set the talk duration before I ever get up on stage, sp I can review the sequence for myself. Then I can focus on giving that particular instance of the talk.
I like this idea. It is weird that presentation software (Ken’s hand-rolled version excepted, of course) doesn’t have any built in way to ‘tag’ slides and no concept of search to go with that.
Imagine presentation software in which ALL of your slides are in one ‘deck’ and the only difference from one talk to another would be the filters you apply to the tags. Which could be topic, date, weight, length of slide and of presentation, etc. By combining tags and filtering/sorting/searching you could create a custom presentation.
You could even have an algorithm that spits out the (likely) length of time for the talk, based on the search/filter parameters already in place.