You will take a real set of notes to a finished, checked deck and time the whole process.
Pick a presentation you have to give in the next few weeks and gather the notes you'd normally work from. You'll run the whole process from lessons 6.1 to 6.3 on it and time yourself from start to finish. At the end you'll have a finished deck and a real comparison with how long decks used to take you.
People often hope AI will take decks off their hands. Decks are also one of the tasks where AI results vary most. Some people cut a day's work to a couple of hours, while others spend the same day fixing generated slides and end up no better off. What usually separates the two groups is the process they followed rather than the tool they used.
Choose a project update, a proposal, a review of results or a recommendation. Gather your source material: meeting notes, a research brief, a spreadsheet, an email thread, or whatever you normally work from.
If any of it is confidential, handle it as in module 2 before it goes near an assistant. Check that the tool is approved for this kind of material. Redact client names, personal details and sensitive figures where policy requires. Keep a private key, a record of what you redacted that you keep to yourself, so you can put those details back into the final deck.
Then find your baseline, which is how long your last similar deck took. If you logged it, use the log. If you didn't, make your best honest estimate and label it as an estimate.
Start the timer at the start of the exercise, before you open anything else.
Work in the order this module teaches and don't skip ahead. Each stage is cheaper to change than the one after it. A weak headline takes seconds to fix at the storyline stage and half an hour once a designed slide sits under it.
For the storyline, give the assistant your notes, your audience, and the decision or action you want. Ask for sentence headlines, slide headlines written as full sentences, as in lesson 6.1. Read the headlines on their own, in order, and revise them until they make the case without the slides.
For the words, produce slide text and speaker notes for each headline, plus a suggested visual for each slide, as in lesson 6.2. Read some of the notes aloud.
For the design, put the approved text into your company template, as in lesson 6.3. Build every chart from your own data, either in the spreadsheet or with chart code. Leave out any generated image that could be mistaken for a real one.
Once the deck is built, check every figure, date and name on every slide and in the speaker notes against your sources. Keep the sources open while you do this. Restore the redacted details from your private key and check those too.
Next, ask one colleague to read only the headlines, in order, without the slides. Ask them for one line back: what they took from it, and anything they'd push back on. This takes them about two minutes and shows whether the story works for someone who wasn't in your head while you wrote it. If their line doesn't match the decision you're asking for, go through the storyline again.
Stop the timer when the deck is ready to present. Record your total time against your baseline, and note whether the baseline came from a log or an estimate.
Kavitha built a deck for a subscription pilot and went through all three stages. The times below are example figures. Her storyline came to nine headlines in about 40 minutes, including two rounds of revision. Slide text and speaker notes took another 50 minutes. Template work took 70 minutes, including rebuilding the pricing chart from her spreadsheet with the axis at zero. Checking figures, names and dates took 25 minutes, and she caught two figures that had drifted.
Her colleague took a day to come back with his read, though it took only two minutes of his time. His line was: "You want a three-month pilot, and the risk is discounting people who'd pay anyway." That matched her argument exactly.
Her total was 40 + 50 + 70 + 25 = 185 minutes. Her last deck of a similar size, a quarterly review, took about six hours (360 minutes) by her own estimate, not from a log. She recorded the saving as roughly half and noted that the baseline was an estimate. She also noted what hadn't worked. The assistant's first storyline led with methodology, and she had to move that slide twice before the recommendation came early enough.
You're finished when you have: a deck in your company template with sentence headlines that make the case on their own, speaker notes for every slide, and every figure checked against its source a colleague's one-line reaction to the headlines a note of your total time against the time your last similar deck took, saying whether that earlier figure came from a log or an estimate
Pick the presentation now and collect your notes, then start your timer before you open anything else.
Deliver the finished deck with speaker notes, a colleague's one-line reaction to the headlines and a time comparison with a previous deck.
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