Audiences are allergic to speakers that fail to properly manage their time. If nothing else, you must convey your main points and stick the landing within the time you have. Organise your content and space accordingly to pace out your story.
Without practising, presenters often underestimate how much time their content takes and end up rushing through their slides on stage.
You can think a sentence much faster in your head than you can actually articulate it out loud in front of an audience. Combine that with a general instinct by speakers to prepare a lot of materials for a fear of running out of things to say and you end up running out of time. It takes some practise to get a feel for how long you need to deliver different materials.
There are different ways to rehearse your presentation. Some people try practising key phrases in front of a mirror or pacing the room going through your entire presentation without repetitions. Others run their presentation by one or more test subjects and get feedback on their content and delivery. Either way, try what works best for you.
No matter how you like to rehearse, this is the safest way to validate that you can pull off your materials within the time you have.
By setting up your content into essential and supporting elements, you can adapt to any timing complications that arise.
There are many reasons why the actual speaking time for your presentation ends up shorter than anticipated. For example, your presentation is part of a longer program and previous segments can take longer than expected. Or you decide to allocate some time to an important question that comes up during your presentation.
The best way to keep yourself flexible and responsive to changes in your speaker slot is to prepare your content so that when you need to speed up your presentation, you do not have to compromise the integrity of your story. You do this by dividing your content into essential and supporting parts beforehand. As soon as you realise you need to speed up, you can skip supporting materials such as examples, background information and other fragments that are not main points.
Maybe you have witnessed a speaker speed up a presentation by visibly advancing multiple slides commenting that these will have to be skipped in the interest of time. The net effect is the audience gets a glimpse at all the stuff they are missing out on. Instead of giving your audience this sense of being rushed, look up how to advance to a specific slide in your particular slide program. This makes for a smoother experience for your audience as they do not see a couple of slides fly by with that feeling of missing out.
Constantly check your pacing and adjust accordingly.
It is incredibly stressful to be in front of an audience and realising that you have too little time left to cover your remaining materials. One of the easiest ways to prevent this is to have some kind of timer with you on stage. You should be able to constantly check if you are on track to stay within your slot, which goes way beyond appointing someone in the audience to give you a hand signal five minutes before the end of your presentation.
You need to know how much time you have per chapter of your presentation and whether you are within that limit. If not, you need to adjust your pace to break even in the end. I suggest to either set up the presenter display to show you the time or bring a big clock you can place somewhere where it is seen by you, but not the audience.
It is an understandable instinct for speakers to spend time warming up and engaging in niceties or long-winded personal intros. Don't let this add up and eat away valuable time, so cut it out.
If you feel the crunch, do not start talking faster. Not only does it also stress out your audience, you are also more likely to lose them since it requires a lot of mental work to follow someone at an accelerated pace of speech for longer periods of time. Instead, skip secondary content and maintain your normal pace.
Some people find it rude to see a speaker repeatedly check their watch, because it may seem like you have somewhere better to be. Instead, you can take it off and place it next to your laptop and walk here to check the time.
Practise your materials, set up according-style content and keep an eye on the time to manage the pace of your presentation.
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