Dead Ink Vinyl

I attended Adobe MAX 2007 at the beginning of October and it was the best conference I’ve ever attended. That’s saying something, because I got to attend some extravagant events during the original dotcom boom. Two things contributed to the event being so good: excellent informational sessions and just plain fun evening events.

I spoke with other MAX attendees who expressed some disappointment with their sessions, so I initially thought that maybe I was just lucky. Then I asked the other attendees if they ever left a session that wasn’t going well and I was shocked to learn that none of them had left any sessions.

There were so many enticing sessions in every time slot that I wonder why people would sit through a session that wasn’t living up to expectations. Three or four times during the conference I found that my first choice wasn’t going to be worth my time, so I stood up and headed to my second choice (and, in one case, to my third choice — which ended up being excellent). No harm to anyone and a better conference experience for me.

I expect that most people stay in a session that is spiraling down the drain because they think it’s rude to leave. It’s not rude. The presenter has already been rude to you by wasting your time. Life is too short and your company has paid too much money for you to suffer through a sub-par, unpracticed presentation when an excellent alternative is two doors down.

I’ve grown less patient with poor presenters as I’ve learned more about how little it takes to deliver a good presentation. A one hour presentation takes 4-7 hours of preparation — not a lot — so I’m not asking too much for the materials and visual aids to be well thought-out and organized. Some presenters have no sense of time and spend a disproportionate amount of it on relatively unimportant parts of their topic. This leads them to rush through the later — and more valuable — content to fit it in the last 10 minutes. A single practice run through the presentation would have highlighted this problem, so there is no excuse to have such poor clock management.

Finally, some of the presenters on whom I walked out were simply afraid of public speaking. They mumbled, they never looked at the audience (preferring to look at the slides or the computer screen, which makes it harder to hear them), or they weren’t able to speak in complete sentences. If you know that you will be presenting at a conference and you have difficulty with public speaking, you owe it to yourself, your attendees, and your topic to gain confidence and composure by practicing public speaking. Join Toastmasters or find other opportunities to speak in front of audiences.

As a conference attendee, you are responsible for maximizing the conference’s value to you. Don’t be afraid to leave a session that isn’t going well. You will find more satisfaction in the conference and derive greater enjoyment from your experiences when you proactive about protecting your time.