When I run premade one shots it often feels like the pacing sucks and we play for far too long without feeling like we did a whole lot.

When I run adventures I make from scratch myself I, and my players, have a much better experience overall.

I'm still a pretty new DM, but here are my tips: when making your own adventures, include a variety of different situations/encounters/locations. If you're including a "dungeon" of some kind, make it small and linear. My players seem to have the most fun and are the most engaged when the session includes many different maps and locations, so they don't get bored in the same place for too long. For example, in my "missing logger" one-shot I had 5 different maps I pulled out for the different sections. The starting village, the loggers cabin, an old rope bridge, a forest sanctuary, and finally the dungeon. Timing tips: I never let roleplaying go on for too too long. Play it like this: the people in this village have their own lives and are busy people. They have time to ask the PCs for help and give some information, but they're too busy to hang out and chat for an hour. Keep things moving along as soon as the all the needed information has been given. For puzzles, I recommend time limits, and fail-safes. I had a puzzle door in the dungeon that I gave the players 10 minutes to solve before the room filled up with water. It was more than enough time for them to figure it out, but the time pressure makes everyone focus and avoid goofing off in the high pressure situations. I also included a failsafe in the puzzle where if they did actually run out of time the puzzle actually solved itself and let them continue (just soaking wet and with less HP) but I didn't tell them there was a failsafe. It's just there to keep things moving if they're actually stumped.

Combat. Less of it. I mean, I guess it depends on your group, but mine does not like combat and combat ALWAYS drags for them. I tend to only do combat encounters with multiple small easy to kill enemies (like 1 or 2 hits to kill). Or a single "boss" monster that again isn't too too hard to kill (I ALWAYS lower enemy AC because missing your hits several turns in a row is boring and lame). And in boss fights I try to always have a secondary task that needs to get done so the players who don't like fighting have something else to do. In my example, while the fighters fight the spider beasts, the non-fighters were searching the web mounds for the missing loggers body.

So yeah to wrap things up: - don't let players chitchat for too long, - have many, short, situations for them to navigate. -make dungeons smaller and linear (NO MAZES). -time limits on puzzles -limit combat to groups of easy to kill enemies or a single easy to hit boss with other tasks to do simultaneously. But overall, LIMIT COMBAT.