5 Reasons Why People Are Falling Asleep in Your Tech Presentations
Find out why people are looking at their phones instead of you during your presentations
Sharing technical knowledge is never easy, and while using a written medium such as an email or an article can be easy for you, creating an interesting presentation and presenting it to others can easily turn into the worst day of your life.
Have you ever had to sit through a boring presentation, fighting the need to fall asleep? Or maybe you were on the presenting side and watched as more than half of your spectators just left the room in the middle of the “good part”? What’s up with that?
You were probably just doing a terrible job and didn’t even realize it. Sounds harsh, I know, but accepting there is a problem is the first step towards solving it.
And here are five others you can follow.
1. You have way too much text on your slides
There are two types of presentations: the ones you’ll be presenting yourself while showing them, and the ones you’ll send over an email to others so they can check them out in their own time.
The second type requires a little more meat on the slides because you won’t be there to fill in the blanks. However, our focus today is on the first type. If you’re presenting a slide, then the content needs to come from you, not the slide.
The slide is actually a visual aid you’re using to get your point across. This is crucial to understand because if you go about it in reverse and consider the slide to be the source of content, then you’ll be either reading from the slide (which is terrible) or under-sharing vocally and expecting people to read what you wrote live. And trust me, nobody reads it live.
Consider the following:
- Write everything you want to say on your slide.
- Capture the main concepts, whether they’re just loose words or simple sentences, and remove everything else.
- If you still have sentences, try to boil them down to even more basic concepts until you have just a few words (it can just be one word, that’s fine too).
With that, make your slide about those concepts. If you have multiple ones, try to list them gradually and cover each one as they appear. If you only have one, maybe try to make it the center of the slide. Show how important that concept is visually and fill in the major gap you left, by speaking.
The content you wrote won’t be lost, you’ll be saying it, so don’t be afraid to remove them. Try to make the slides visually appealing and not a wall of text.
2. You’re going back and forth during your presentation
If you’re a first-timer, it’s very easy to move from slide to slide quite fast and forget to mention some concepts along the way. Oftentimes when that happens, you reach a point where you have to stop and play catch up; otherwise, people listening will be confused trying to figure out the puzzle only you understand.
This is normal; it happens to all of us. But going back a few slides, explaining the missing concepts, and then fast-forwarding to the slide you were in a few minutes ago is not the right way to solve this.
In fact, the way to solve this problem is to avoid it altogether.
The main reason this happens is that you’re nervous and while you’re speaking, you can’t even stop to look at your own slides where you left the visual clues you needed to remember what to talk about.
So the solution? Breathe!
Just take a moment at the start of each slide, just a few seconds, to breathe and look like you’re thinking. This gives spectators the impression you’re actually pondering about something, while in reality, you’re just trying to remember what comes next.
Some experienced speakers even take a sip of water they have at hand, partially because if you’re speaking the throat tends to dry quickly, but also to gain time and think. This also works great if you’re doing an online presentation — slow down and let everyone look at the current slide by drinking a little water.
And most importantly, relax, let the concepts come to you. You wrote the presentation, after all. It’s all there, and you just need to let it flow through your mouth.
3. You only have a single tone in your voice
Check out this incredible video from 1989:
It’s probably one of the most boring tutorials you’ll ever watch, not because it’s old or because it’s covering Word but rather because of the speaking tone of the teacher.
A perfect example of what I mean is around the five-minute mark. Listen to the man talking nonstop about word processors. Did you get any of that or were you too distracted by life?
You can have the same effect on people if you only use a single tone in your voice when speaking and presenting your information. You can have the most beautiful slides ever created, but if you present them like this guy, then nobody will pay attention to them — or you for that matter — because their brains will consider you to be background noise. Nothing is catching the listener’s attention, so you’ve lost them no matter what you’re saying.
Use your pitch to stress the important words, and raise your voice if you want to highlight an idea. Heck, even yell if you have to. It’ll grab the listener’s attention, that’s for sure. Just try to not overdo it.
It’s hard to explain through writing how to improve your pitch. Instead, check out this short video explaining what it means to stop speaking in monotone. A nice trick, shared at the end of it, is to watch presentations with a 50% speed. This will make it impossible to understand, but it will highlight the changes in tone and pitch the speaker is doing. Try it with your favorite TED talk. You’ll see what I mean.
And remember, speaking is not just about words but about the way you utter those words. Use your pitch as if it were the bold command on your text editor to highlight the ideas you’re saying through a change in your voice. This will keep your listeners actively listening to what you’re saying and paying attention to you and your presentation.
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4. You’re moving too fast
Unless you suddenly got your presenting time reduced by half, there is no reason for you to run through the presentation.
Just because you already know the concepts you’re presenting doesn’t mean your audience will. And if you rush through everything, you won’t give them a chance to understand anything.
Instead, try to slow down. Remember the trick about sipping the glass of water? Use it to slow down: Every two or three slides, stop and drink.
If you're sharing complex information, a snippet of code or maybe an architecture diagram, you want people to spend a few seconds looking at it. You’ll have time to dissect it and explain it in a minute, but let them read it and try to figure out what it says.
And when your slide is not the center of attention, speak slowly, maybe even ask questions of the audience and keep them engaged. An engaged audience will really listen to what you’re saying.
5. You don’t know what you’re saying
I hate it when this happens to me. I mean it’s terrible to see someone presenting a deck and clearly not knowing what they’re saying, but it’s even worse being that person.
I’ve been here, mostly because I underestimated the topic. I would just throw some slides together and be done with the presentation. However, when I was presenting, the audience would ask a question about the reasons for my assertions or ask about a related topic I should’ve researched, and I’d be left speechless.
It’s terrible, and you should try to avoid this happening to you by doing your work. If you have to do a presentation, research the topic you’re covering. You may feel like you’re an expert on it, but there are always new frameworks being released, or new languages being created, or something new in the tech world.
Make a mental (or drawn) map with the presentation’s topics in the center and start adding other concepts and technologies in the peripheral. Some of these extra topics might be mentioned during the Q&A sessions, so keep them close and read a bit about them. By all means, focus on your presentation, but keep all these satellite topics in the back of your head so you’ll have an answer to those questions, even if it’s “I’ve read a bit about it, but I can’t really answer that question now. I’d have to do some tests.”
Presenting in public is not easy for tech folks. Most of us are great at writing code and even writing articles, but when it comes to speaking, we’re not experienced. And while it might be scary, it’s also a great way to leave your comfort zone and connect with others.
Just keep in mind that presenting is not as easy as throwing data together into a set of slides and talking about them. You have to keep your audience engaged through the use of interesting visuals and through the control of your own voice. Use both to get the message across and keep your audience from snoozing off.
Do you have any other tips for tech presenters? Leave them in the comments!