READY
READY
Five minutes is the standard slot for a conference lightning talk, a wedding toast, a class presentation and a Toastmasters speech. It is also, at a normal speaking pace of about 130 words a minute, roughly 650 words, which is the number worth knowing before you write rather than after.
Speakers run over for a predictable reason: rehearsal at a desk is faster than delivery in a room. Pauses get longer, an aside appears, a question interrupts. A talk that takes five minutes alone takes six in front of people, so rehearse to four and a half.
The tip: put the timer where you can see it without turning your head, and glance at it at planned points rather than continuously. Decide beforehand where you should be at the halfway mark (a specific slide or sentence) and check once, there. Watching a clock throughout is visible to the audience and does nothing except make you rush.
Press F for fullscreen, or leave it on a laptop at the front. The digits are pixel blocks, legible at a distance in a way small text is not.
Around 650 at a normal pace of about 130 words a minute. Aim under that: speaking to a room is always slower than reading at a desk.
Click the minutes on the readout and type over them, before you start. The address works too and is the one to bookmark: ?t=3m for a lightning talk, ?t=20m for a conference session.
No interim alarm, by design: an interruption mid-sentence is worse than running over. The readout and the progress bar are what you glance at instead.
If you are presenting from the same machine, the button beside the sound control opens the countdown in a window that stays above your other windows, so it can sit in a corner while the deck takes the rest. Not every browser has this, and the button is only drawn where it works, so a second screen or a laptop at the front is still the fallback worth rehearsing with.