February 2012

Timer Sheet for Toastmasters

Your first night in playing the Timer's role in your Toastmasters club? You'd better have a timer sheet so you will sound professional when you present your Timer's report.
The timer role in Toastmasters chapter meetings is an important role and shouldn't be taken for granted. Obviously the person handling the role will ultimately determine the pass/fail status of the speaker's project – not the evaluator and grammarian who merely
evaluates how did the project went. In addition the Timer plays a bigger unwritten role to ensure that everyone goes home on time, which is quite important since the meeting participants may have families waiting at home or another agenda to complete for the day.
A good way to play the
timer's role successfully is to have a timer sheet. This is a simple table prepared from the meeting's agenda that lists the planned speeches along with their timings. This sheet could be prepared by the Sergeant-At-Arms who also prepares the meeting's agenda or the Timer herself prepares it herself.
Typically the row headings of a Toastmasters Timer Sheet mirrors the contents of the agenda and contains:
  • The Speech Type – Meeting Address, Table Topics, Project, Evaluation, and Announcements.
  • The Orator/Speaker Name – that is, who are planned to deliver that particular speech.
  • The Speech Title – This normally applies for Projects although it can also apply for Table Topics speeches.
But the column headings will contain columns for use just by the timer:
  • Time Marks – How long the speech should last – minimum time (Green flag), warning time (Yellow flag), and maximum time (Red flag).
  • Actual Time - How long the speech actually lasted. If a stopwatch is not available, this can also be recorded as Start Time and End Time – the duration is obtained by subtracting the two.
It's a good idea if you leave some empty space between the items in this timesheet, to make room for corrections and/or ad-hoc speeches. That is if a project speaker was late, the speaker scheduled after him can make use of the slot. Likewise sometimes the table topics are really enjoyable so that people would like to extend it to a few more speakers than planned.
This
looks like a lot of materials to prepare. Not really if you already have a pre-made Toastmasters timer sheet. In fact, we have one that you can freely download and use in your own speech club. Simply enter your name and e-mail address below to get a free PDF copy of our timer sheet for use in your Toastmasters chapter meetings.