Duration

An professional wishing to communicate effectively must work within the limits of people's attention span. What can be daunting is that attention spans have shrunk to the point where a modern audience often considers 50 words or a 60-second video to be too long.

Shrinking attention spans are a reality of modern communication, and the phenomenon can either be ignored or embraced. When communicating with the general public, ignoring short attention spans will practically guarantee that no one will pay attention to what you are saying, but when communicating within your organization, you have much more flexibility in choosing the duration of a meeting, presentation, conversation, or discussion; as well as deciding how much time someone will need to read your documents and emails.

When communicating with the general public, the question is not, "How long is too long," but "How short is too short?" The shorter the content you make, the higher the likelihood that someone will listen to, watch, or read something in its entirety, but with less time there is less content, and finding the balance between short enough to hold your audience's attention and long enough to communicate useful information can be extremely difficult.

When communicating internally within your organization, the people you work with will sit through long meetings, listen to long presentations, and read long documents and emails simply due to a sense of professional obligation.

For example, in a professional work environment, if a meeting is scheduled for 1 hour, someone walking out after the first five minutes because they found the meeting boring is entirely unacceptable. If someone sends you a 30-page report, telling the author that you didn't read it because it was too long would be rude and dismissive. As a result, professionals tend not to complain about meetings or documents that are far too long to hold their attention.

The effect this has on the workplace is one of the worst-kept secrets in the professional world: people who look like they are paying attention may not be paying attention at all. Experienced professionals are practiced in putting away their phones, sitting up straight, and looking at the presenter, to give the impression that they are paying attention even though they are mentally checked out and thinking about anything else.

This then leads us to the sobering realization that just because our colleagues may look like they are paying attention, they might not be paying attention at all. If you are giving a presentation, as you gaze out across your audience, you may see people sitting straight up, with their hands clasped in front of them on the table, staring straight at you, but they might as well be fast asleep in terms of the attention they are actually giving you.

To make matters worse, if you asked your colleague what they thought of the presentation, to spare your feelings they might say the presentation was fine. If you then ask them a question related to the presentation, you may find that they avoid answering the question to hide the fact that they were not paying attention.

Considering that our colleagues may never be honest regarding how much attention they actually give to what we say or write, to be effective communicators we need to think about internal communication more similarly to how we would communicate with the general public.

The reality is that our colleagues are also members of the general public, and their true attention span may actually be only a few seconds. During the workday, our colleagues are using their phones, skimming over texts, tweets, posts, and videos looking for something that grabs their limited attention for a few seconds. When those same colleagues put away their phones at the start of your 1-hour meeting, their attention span hasn't gotten longer, they are just too polite to tell you that your 1-hour meeting is approximately 1-hour too long.

If everything in the business world could be communicated in only a few seconds, our approach would be simple: no matter what we are communicating, keep the duration to no more than 20 seconds, aiming for an ideal length of around 10 seconds. The fact is, however, that not all information can be adequately communicated in only a few seconds, and that sometimes, a full hour is actually needed to cover all of the information that is relevant and important to your audience.

When long-form communication is necessary, to maximize your chances of maintaining the attention of your audience for as long as possible, you might consider having several versions of your presentation that are carefully crafted to fit within a set amount of time.

For example, if you were a salesperson who routinely gives product presentations to customers, you might create a 10-second, 30-second, 2-minute, 5-minute, 20-minute, and 45-minute version of the same presentation.

One approach to create this set of presentations would be to first create the 45-minute version, as this is generally considered the maximum length of a professional presentation, as it leaves 15 minutes for questions in a 1-hour meeting. Once you have the longest version, you can then begin removing content to get down to the shorter versions, but the shorter the presentation, the more you have to practice making sure that your timing is precise.

When you give a 45-minute presentation, people will forgive you if you run over to 46 minutes, but if you are in an elevator with a customer, and you only have enough time to give the 10-second version, being a few seconds off may result in the customer leaving before you are done. In the business world, this scenario is called giving an "Elevator pitch."

A useful guide in developing precise timing is to figure out your average spoken words per minute, which for most people is around 150. If you are rehearsing to give a 30-second presentation, you then know you should be around 75 words; for a 10-second presentation, you should be around 25 words.

You may think that nothing of importance can be communicated in just 25 words, but if you challenge yourself, you will be pleasantly surprised with how much information you can convey in such a short period of time. As a general rule, the goal of your shorter presentations is to create the opportunity to give your longer presentations, as someone who likes your 10-second version will be more open to the 2-minute version, and if they like the 2-minute version, they may be interested in hearing the 5-minute or 20-minute version.

This is how we can adapt to the reality of everyone having a shorter attention span. While this takes a lot of work, and a lot of practice, it is far better to have multiple presentations of the same information at various durations, than to stare at blank faces that look like they're paying attention, when in your heart you know that they are not.