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.