TJ Walker argues that there is no single optimal speech length; instead, speakers should speak as long as they remain interesting and are accomplishing their communication goals. He challenges blanket advice that shorter is always better, cites (with skepticism) a 1974 U.S. Defense Department study claiming ~17.5 minutes as optimal, and notes TED's 18-minute rule mainly enforces discipline. Practical recommendations include defining your goal, planning time (reserve Q&A), and using as much time as needed to make ideas memorable—but no more.
Chapters
How long should you talk? How long should your presentation be? There's a lot of debate over this. The generic advice, people say, oh, be short, shorter, shorter, shorter. Everyone's losing their attention span. The shorter, the better. YouTube video, make it a minute. If it's a keynote speech, it shouldn't be more than 18 minutes. There's a lot of advice out there, all focusing on shorter, shorter, shorter. I'm here to tell you, wait a second. I've seen speakers stand up, speak quickly, be very abstract, do a quick data dub, sit down. After two minutes, nobody remembered a thing. On the other hand, I've seen speakers stand up at 10am, speak till midnight. They were consistently interesting and engaging and memorable, told fantastic stories, interacted with the audience, and the audience wanted more. And this is after more than a dozen hours. So it's not necessarily about being shorter. You should speak for as long as you're interesting. Now, there was a study done by the United States Defense Department in 1974 that purported to show that the optimum length of a speech was 17 and a half minutes. Guess what? I don't believe it. If you're boring, 30 seconds is too long. If you're interesting, two hours can be too short. You need to step back for a moment and ask yourself, or start, what is your goal? What are you trying to get the audience to do now? What messages do you really need them to understand and remember in order to get them to do what you want them to do and, and work backwards from there. If it's a situation where you control the time, if it's your own meeting, your own event, your own corporate staff meeting, you can control the time. Sometimes you're just told you've got an hour slot at this conference, and then, you know, prepare 45 minutes worth of content. Leave yourself 15 minutes for the Q&A or maybe 10 minutes, and finish a little early. Nothing wrong with finishing a little bit early. Something I try to do. TED the TED conference you've probably heard a great deal about famously limits its speakers to 18 minutes. I don't think there's anything magic about it other than it forces discipline. A lot of smart, intelligent people who are used to speaking for an hour or two hours now have to refine, narrow, edit their best stuff down to 18 minutes. So it's a great discipline, but I don't think there's anything magic about that. They could have picked 14 minutes, they could have picked 19 and a half minutes, but there is value to giving people some discipline. Otherwise they might just go on and on and on. I want you to focus on what are the ideas that you need people to understand. Speak to them. Use as much time as it takes to make the ideas come alive and be remembered. Don't take any more time than that. But don't take any less time either.
