Practice mode

Reading your slides silently is not rehearsal. It feels productive and it teaches you nothing, because the whole point of presenting is that you are doing three things at once — remembering the argument, choosing the right words, and keeping your body still. Only rehearsing out loud exercises all three.

Time yourself against a stopwatch, standing up, at the pace you would actually speak. The useful rule of thumb is about one minute per slide, so a fifteen-slide deck is a fifteen-minute talk. If you are running long, the fix is almost always to cut slides rather than speed up.

The timer on this page does two jobs: it gives you a per-slide budget so you can see which slide is eating your time, and it counts filler words, which is the fastest measurable way to notice that you are nervous about one specific slide.