Why it’s important to have notes for presentations.

2 min read

The biggest problem that most of us face when we are presenting is not that we don’t know enough about the topic but that we know too much. And we never have enough time to cover everything that we think we need to cover. The challenge is always, how much is enough and how much is too much? What do we leave in and what do we take out?

And the more senior the audience and the more important the presentation the more pressure there is on you to do it well. The other problem is of course is that the more pressure we are under the more likely we are to forget something critical, or to go off track, or run over time or simply get things wrong.

So what’s the tool that we can use to make sure that none of us ever suffer again from ‘stage fright’ or getting ‘tongue tied”, how do we make sure that we cover only what we intended to cover, and not meander our way through a convoluted ‘stream of consciousness’ diatribe?

The answer is, a good set of notes! Notes give you a path to follow, a way to get from start to finish without deviating and getting off track with irrelevant information. Notes mean not having to spend hours memorizing your presentation, never having to worry about forgetting what to say, or how to start and how to end, and as a bonus, a great way to make sure you don’t overrun run your time slot.

Of course there are those who say using notes is a form of ‘cheating’ and that a good presenter shouldn’t use notes. I say to them; do you want to be like a Martin Luther King, I have a Dream, a Winston Churchill We will fight them on the beaches, a John F Kennedy, ask not what your country can do for you.

Or do you want to be like Texas Governor Rick Perry, during the Presidential debate.  "I will tell you. It's three agencies of government when I get there that are gone, Commerce, Education, and the...uh...what's the third one there?" "Let's see...I can't, the third one, sorry," he said. "Oops."