One leader who is an exceptionally inspiring speaker has explained that the key for him is to start to

prepare his big speeches six months before he does them. He isn’t preparing the entire speech; he
just starts. If you have a big presentation coming up over the next few weeks or months, open a file
right now and spend four minutes starting to put down any ideas. Then close the file. No more than
four minutes. Just start it.

A colleague in New York uses a simple hack: whenever she schedules a meeting or phone call, she
takes exactly fifteen seconds to type up the main objectives for that meeting, so on the morning of
the meeting when she sits down to prepare talking points she can refer to them. She doesn’t need to
plan the whole meeting agenda. Just a few seconds of early preparation pay a valuable dividend.