One idea a week to help you teach and present with more clarity, confidence, and calm. No fluff. No scripts. Just practical tools that land.
I used 90 slides in 30 minutes
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At a recent talk in Hobart, I had 90 slides. Thirty minutes. Ninety slides. If you’re doing the maths, that’s three slides a minute. Which sounds… fast. By most presentation advice, that’s a problem. Too fast. Afterwards, no one mentioned it. Not one comment about pace. Because they hadn’t noticed. 💡 ONE IDEA WELLThe “one slide per minute” rule has been around for years. It sounds sensible. Clean. Reassuring. It also falls apart the moment you watch a great talk. Some speakers spend three minutes on one slide. And then there’s PechaKucha. 20 slides. 20 seconds each. No control. Rigid. Fast. Unforgiving. It works beautifully… But most talks aren’t PechaKucha. So the question isn’t: “How many slides should I have?” It’s: “What job are my slides doing?” Because slide count is just a proxy for something else. Clarity. And when those are off, we blame the number. 🧰 LESS MESS, MORE MESSAGEIf slide count is a proxy… then changing the number won’t fix the problem. There was a time when slide count really mattered. Physical slides. Carousels. Click. Click. Click. Now we have effectively infinite slides. And that changes the game. Most people respond by cramming more onto each slide. More bullets. It looks efficient. It isn’t. Because the audience now has to read… That’s cognitive load in action. Too many demands on limited working memory. And when that happens, something gives. Usually… understanding. Use slides to build, not store. Instead of one crowded slide with five bullet points… One idea at a time. One image. No animations. No distractions. Just progression. You’re not adding slides. You’re reducing load. There’s a move I use a lot that most people miss. If I need prompts… I don’t add text to the slide. I duplicate it. Same visual. To the audience, nothing changes. To me, everything is easier. No dense slides. Just a clean image… and a clear next line. Because slides aren’t the script. They’re scenery. 🧭 TRY THISTake one dense slide. The one with five bullet points. Break it into three… or five. Then rehearse it. Notice what happens to your pace. If your audience never knew how many slides you used… What would they actually remember? The number… Or how easy it was to follow? Slide count is what speakers worry about. Cognitive load is what audiences experience. |
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One idea a week to help you teach and present with more clarity, confidence, and calm. No fluff. No scripts. Just practical tools that land.
There's a slide we've all sat through. A table lifted straight from the paper, axis labels too small to read from row three, a red box drawn around the number the presenter actually wants you to notice. What's in the box? They say the same thing every time. You don't need to read all this, just look at the red box. Except you try anyway. You can't not. Your eyes go to the numbers while your ears try to keep pace with the sentence being spoken over them. You manage this for about four seconds,...
The paramedic on the screen has a glow. Not sweat. Not stage light. Something under the skin, orange-red, like a Ready Brek advert built by someone with better software than Weetabix ever had. The speaker is talking about cognitive overload during resuscitation. The flood of information a clinician has to filter in the worst four minutes of someone's life. Every slide behind them is doing the opposite of what the words are asking for. I lean forward. Not because I'm gripped. Because I want to...
The speaker pack was cheerful. Dates, timings, AV specs. And then one line I haven't been able to put down: "You'll need a theme song to walk out to — we can help with that." A theme song. Like a boxer. Like a wrestler bursting through smoke and pyrotechnics. I'm going to be standing on that stage talking about the death of my daughter. What the hell would I choose? 💡 ONE IDEA WELL I started the way anyone would. I scrolled through songs I love, auditioning them for a job I couldn't describe....