Ever pulled a presentation together for work at the last minute? Yeah, well it’s probably a lot more obvious than you think.
Here are the signs you’re not as prepared as you said you were:
- You start with a 15-minute meditation, then stop for a 10-minute stretch break, and end with 20 minutes of silent introspection.
- Your co-presenter’s name is “Lorem Ipsum.”
- There’s a typo on the first slide. And all the other slides.
- The handouts are still warm from the copy machine.
- You start by saying you want to keep this “very high level,” which means you didn’t actually prepare anything.
- You pass around your phone for people to look at screenshots you forgot to add to the presentation.
- Every slide is just one word in a giant font.
- Every other slide is 5,000 words in a tiny font.
- Every other, other slide is an animated gif that has nothing to do with the topic.
- You ask if anyone has any questions before you’ve even started presenting anything, then when someone asks a question, you ask if anyone else knows the answer.
- You’ve put random memes of kittens, puppies, or babies on your slides to distract your audience from the fact that none of this makes any sense.
- You forgot to delete the contact information or bio of the co-worker you “borrowed” the slides from.
- You are presenting your plan for Q3, but it says “Q3 2014.”
- None of your bullet styles match from one slide to the next.
- You have a bullet point list that includes: TBD, Ask Mark for the latest numbers, [Add goal].
- You tell everyone you prepared a lengthy PowerPoint, but instead of showing it, you’d rather “hash it out” in an interactive discussion.
- You present for five minutes, then turn it over to the group for “brainstorming.”
- You draw each slide in real time on the white board, spending lots of time picking the right color markers.
- You ask the audience what they think you should talk about.
- You accidentally project your desktop and it’s littered with screenshots you were taking up until right before you got up to present.
- You keep taking extended sips of water.
- You play a video that takes up 95% of your time.
- You stop presenting to re-arrange your slides mid-session.
- None of your graphs have an X or Y axis.
- The slide numbers are sometimes there, sometimes not, and definitely aren’t in order.
- Several slide layouts were obviously destroyed by the template when you pulled them in from another deck.
- You decide that, instead of what you were going to present, going around the room and sharing what everybody did over the weekend would be a better use of time.
- You keep asking the one person who knows anything to “back you up here” which amounts to doing your presentation for you.
- You tell a lengthy story about your childhood and, at the last minute, try to relate it back to what you were supposed to be talking about.
- You need to be frequently reminded about what you were supposed to be talking about.
- You brought a prop.
- Your presentation is a Google Doc of random ideas you wrote down in your previous meeting.
- You navigate to different social media sites for a “live demo” but end up just scrolling through posts.
- You say you really can’t start without a certain person who’s not there, then you decide to cancel altogether.
- You ask a co-worker to control the slides for you, and when they ask why your slides are blank, you say they must have “messed something up.”
- Right before you start, you say you have to run to the bathroom, and you never come back.
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This article was originally published on The Cooper Review. It has been republished here with permission.