What do you do first if you have 6 weeks to prepare a presentation (or speech), 6 days to prepare a presentation, 6 hours to prepare a presentation, or 6 minutes?

If you have 6 weeks.  This is an ideal amount of time.  Not so far off that events will change the ground of your talk.  Not so near that you can’t think about it calmly.  Spend a few days getting the idea of your talk into one or two sentences.  Six weeks before his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr was thinking something like, white America owes a promissory note to Black America for the pain and suffering of slavery.  It’s time to redeem that note and pay off the debt; it’s time for us to live together as true brothers and sisters.

Once you’ve got the high-level message, then you can begin to think about the audience and to write the speech.  Ask yourself, what is the problem the audience has for which my expertise (or topic) is the solution?  Begin by talking about the problem, so that you can get your audience nodding in agreement with you.  Then dive into your solution.  The two sections should be roughly the same length, so that they appear appropriate together to the audience.  Keep your focus by jettisoning anything, no matter how clever it sounds, that doesn’t fit your high-level summary.

If you have 6 days.  If you are starting from scratch 6 days out, it’s time to pick and choose among your already-existing areas of expertise.  Don’t try to rehearse and master something new.  You’ve spoken before about beekeeping; time to go back to the bees.  Decide what the main headings are that you will address.  Use the problem- solution structure as a starting place.  Rough out the speech in a set of chunks of content.

If you have 6 hours.  If you only have six hours to prepare a speech, then I hope you are already a strong subject-matter expert and you are comfortable holding forth on aspects of that topic, whether it’s beekeeping or physics or the sales quotas for your company this year.  Your focus now should be in sketching out a set of bullet points that structure your flow.  Don’t try to write a script because you don’t have time to learn it.  Instead, create a strong outline with no more than about seven points on it.  You should be able to talk about each of those points for 3 – 5 minutes.  That creates a 20 – 35 minute talk, which is as long as you should think about holding forth in this era of shortened attention spans.

If you have 6 minutes.  Get a headline POV on your subject.  Bees are essential to the survival of humanity because they pollinate the crops we need for ample food.  Then, note down some supporting facts, insights, and stories that support this headline POV.  Then close with the headline, repeated in slightly different form.  You should finish in less than 10 minutes.  Good luck.

Here’s hoping you always have a full 6 weeks to prepare.  But if you don’t, then here’s hoping you have already developed some expertise in a body of knowledge you are ready to share with the world.