Take a real set of notes all the way to a finished, checked deck, and time how long the whole process takes.
Choose a presentation you are due to give within the next few weeks, then collect the material you would usually build it from. You'll take it through the full process from lessons 6.1 to 6.3 and keep a clock running from the first step to the last.
The timing matters because AI help with decks is very uneven. Plenty of people expect an assistant to take slide-making off their plate, and decks are among the tasks where results vary the most. Some people get a day's work down to a couple of hours. Others spend that same day correcting generated slides and finish no further ahead. What usually separates the two groups is the process each person followed rather than the tool they picked.
Any of these works: a project update, a proposal, a review of results or a recommendation. Gather your sources in whatever form you normally use them, whether that's meeting notes, a research brief, a spreadsheet or an email thread.
Before any confidential material reaches an assistant, deal with it as module 2 sets out. Confirm the tool is approved for material of that kind. Where policy requires it, redact client names, personal details and sensitive figures. As you redact, write each change into a private key, a record you keep to yourself of what came out, so you can put those details back into the finished deck.
Your baseline is the time your last similar deck took. Take it from your log if you keep one. Without a log, give your most honest estimate and mark it clearly as an estimate.
Start the timer at the very beginning of the exercise, before you open any other file or tool.
Follow the module's order and don't jump ahead: storyline first, then words, then design. Each stage costs less to change than the one after it. A weak headline can be fixed in seconds while you're still on the storyline, but once a designed slide sits under it, the same fix takes about half an hour.
At the storyline stage, hand the assistant your notes, a description of your audience, and the decision or action you want from them. Ask it for sentence headlines, which are slide headlines written as complete sentences, the way lesson 6.1 shows. Then read only the headlines, top to bottom, and keep revising until they argue the case with no slides behind them.
At the words stage, get slide text, speaker notes and a suggested visual for each headline, following lesson 6.2. Say some of the speaker notes out loud as you go.
At the design stage, move the approved text into the company template, following lesson 6.3. Make every chart from your own data, either in the spreadsheet or with chart code. Drop any generated image that could be mistaken for a real one.
Once the deck is built, open your sources beside it and go through every figure, date and name, both on the slides and in the speaker notes. Then bring back the redacted details from your private key and check each of those against the sources as well.
Next, send one colleague the headlines alone, in order, with no slides attached. Ask for a single line in return: what they understood and anything they'd push back on. It takes them about two minutes and tells you whether the argument holds for someone who wasn't inside your head while you wrote it. If their line points somewhere other than the decision you're asking for, go back through the storyline.
When the deck is ready to present, stop the timer. Write the total down next to your baseline, with a note of whether the baseline was logged or estimated.
You're finished when you have all three of these:
the deck in your company template, with sentence headlines that make the case by themselves, speaker notes on every slide, and every figure checked against its source your colleague's one-line reaction to the headlines a note comparing your total time with the time for the last similar deck, stating whether that earlier figure came from a log or an estimate
Kavitha (an invented example, with example figures throughout) is preparing a deck for a subscription pilot and takes it through all three stages. Her storyline comes to nine headlines in about 40 minutes, two rounds of revision included. The slide text and speaker notes take 50 minutes. Template work takes 70 minutes, part of which goes on rebuilding the pricing chart from her spreadsheet so the axis starts at zero. Checking figures, names and dates takes 25 minutes, and in that time she finds two figures that had drifted from the source.
Her colleague doesn't reply until a day later, though the reading itself takes him two minutes. His line is that she wants a three-month pilot, and the risk is discounting people who would pay anyway. That matches the argument she meant to make exactly.
Adding up the stages gives 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, since she had no log for it. She records the saving as roughly half, with a note that the baseline was estimated. She also writes down what went wrong: the assistant's first storyline opened with methodology, and she had to move that slide twice before the recommendation came early enough in the deck.
Pick your presentation now and collect your notes, then start your timer before you open anything else.
Hand in the finished deck with speaker notes, a one-line reaction from a colleague who read the headlines, and a comparison of the time taken with a previous deck.
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