If you’ve never heard it before, it’s a doozy: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Chances are, you’ve seen this in your life and in your organization.
Timothy Ferriss’s book The Four Hour Work Week references the same principle. We often make a commitment, first, to a certain amount of time we’ll spend “working”. Then, out of a need to justify such large expenditures of time, we find things to fill the space. It takes a great degree of confidence and honesty to work towards critical objectives instead of hourly obligations, but more than anything else this is probably the one characteristic that sets apart truly successful and effective people from their colleagues.
It’s no different with presentations, and many presenters unnecessarily shoot themselves in the foot by either agreeing to speak for more time than is really necessary to accomplish something, or trying to fill the space they have with far more information than the audience can reasonably handle. Some of the best, most convincing presentations we’ve have had up to half of their time invested in multimedia and entertainment/storytelling. These presenters have the confidence to understand that tilling and fertilizing the soil is far more important than how careful you are in planting the seed. Ideas take root in happy, engaged minds.
The next time you have a presentation, take a look at how much time is allotted and what the primary objective is. Is the topic really so complicated that an hour of charts and graphs is necessary? If so, fine. But if not, invest your time creating fertile minds. We can’t always help how much time is allotted to us, but we do determine how we use it. If you try to fill the entire space with “work”, you’re going to take away from the overall receptivity of your audience and undermine your own objectives.
Question: How can you maximize the effectiveness of your presentations by using less time?
