I paid my electricity bill during a lecture

I paid my electricity bill during a pre-recorded lecture on assessment.

Not after it.
During it.

The lecture played in one tab and my bank in another. Somewhere between the reference number and the confirm button, the speaker made what was probably an important point.

I couldn't tell you what it was. I wasn't listening.

This wasn't a one-off.
I've watched every lecture of my Master's with something else open.
Emails. Bills. Whatever was shouting loudest that day.

The lecture never brings me back.
What brings me back is the same small jolt you get with a book, when you realise you've read the same paragraph three times and taken none of it in.
You weren't reading. You were just letting your eyes move.

The slide on the screen hadn't changed.

Nothing told me I'd gone.

💡 ONE IDEA WELL

The slide went up. It was dense: a heading, a block of bullet points, a diagram doing its best in the corner.
I read it in about thirty seconds.

The then speaker spent the next few minutes talking through it.

My eyes had finished. My ears hadn't.
But a voice is easy to leave running in the background.
So my eyes went looking for something else to do, and the electricity bill was right there, one tab over.

In a lecture theatre, it would have been harder to leave.
The speaker moves.
They catch your eye.
The person next to you shifts in their seat.
A room is full of small signals that something is still happening, and that someone might notice if you drift.

A recording has none of that.
The only thing on screen that could have told me the lecture had moved on was the slide.
And the slide hadn't moved.

When I clicked back, it was still there, as if nothing had happened.
As far as it knew, nothing had.

🧰 LESS MESS, MORE MESSAGE

I don't think it was a bad slide.

In a lecture theatre it might have been fine.
The speaker would have been standing beside it, moving, pointing, catching someone's eye.
The slide was never meant to hold the room on its own.

On a recording, it has to.
And it can't.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

In a couple of weeks, I'm submitting a recorded presentation for my Master's. Somewhere, an assessor will open it in one tab, with their inbox in the other.

The obvious fix is to change slides more often and keep the screen moving.
I don't want to do that.
A slide every few seconds turns a talk into a flipbook, and you end up building slides to hold attention instead of to carry an idea.

The other fix is the little bubble of your face floating in the corner of the slide.

I'm not a fan of that either.
It covers part of what you built, and you end up as a disembodied head haunting your own presentation.

​
But there's already something on the screen that changes constantly, and it costs nothing extra.
Your face.

On a recording, the slide isn't the only thing people are watching.
They are watching you.

You're the part of the screen that tells a drifting viewer the lecture is still going.

⌨️ TRY THIS

If you're presenting or recording on Zoom, this one is in your hands.

When you share your screen, open Presenter layout and choose Side by side.
Your slides sit on one side and your face on the other.
Nothing is covered, and no head floats over your diagram.
​
It carries through to the recording, too. I checked.

When a slide needs to stay up for a while, let it.

Look at the camera, not your notes.
You're the part of the screen that's still moving, so be worth coming back to.

They'll still open the other tab. You're just trying to bring them back before they've read the same paragraph three times.

🧭 ASK YOURSELF THIS

What tells them you're still there?

Know someone recording a talk this term? Forward this to them.

​
Speak soon,

Andy

PS. If you're one of my assessors and you've got this open in another tab: hello. I'll be on the left-hand side of the screen.