English Communication Skills: Presentation Tips for Time of Day Pitfalls Blog 199

What time of day will you be speaking or doing a presentation?  Will it make a difference? Absolutely.

Here are some pitfalls for morning presentations.  

Breakfast/early morning

• Listeners may be groggy.  Choose a stimulating issue  or anecdote to open with. Get audience involvement by having them raise their hand in agreement or disagreement. Example: Raise your hand if you or someone you know wants to move in the next six months.
• People may be in a rush.  Don’t do leisurely humor or drawn-out details.  At breakfast, heed the great US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s advice: “Be sincere, be brief, be seated.”
• Listeners may be preoccupied with work tasks of the day.  That affects their receptivity.  Draw them into the topic with quick anecdotes or thought provoking quotations.
• People attending may be irritable. Why? Because they had to change their morning commute to attend the meeting.

Mid-morning

• Listeners may need a coffee break.  Provide coffee and tea.  Otherwise listeners may head to the nearest cafeteria and miss a chunk of your presentation.
• Attendees may need to use the restrooms.  If your listeners have been sitting for more than an hour, give them a quick three-minute break.  Otherwise, they’ll just leave in the middle anyway—interrupting other people  in the audience and distracting you.
• People may need to check in to their office for messages.  Again, a three minute break is good to give them a chance to make a quick call without bothering the whole room.  Don’t give them too long, or they may get bogged down with expanded work details

Immediately before lunch

• Listeners are hungry and probably can’t concentrate well.  If no one asks any questions before lunch, it doesn’t mean they are bored only that they’d rather go eat.  A good alternative is to invite people to ask questions throughout your presentation.  Be sure to keep questions and answers in check so you don’t run overtime.  Audiences are very forgiving – except for making them late for lunch.
• Listeners have been sitting all morning and may need to stretch.  Invite them to stand up and take a thirty-second “stretch break” right at their seats.
• Listeners may get “information overload.”  Supplement your speaking with handouts so people can review material later.

Next time: What about lunch presentations?

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