How many times are we conflicted with the segmentation of time in our activities?
The essence of an hour, a half hour, three hours...
How do we internally segment these and what are effective within ourselves and our audiences? Is your presentation/discussion worthy of a half-hour sitcom serial, potentially an hour long show, or possibly a two hour movie? Should you allow commercials?
Traditional thought is that we have some internal sense for segments of time and periods of an hour (or a half-hour) are adequate structures to base our meetings and conversations on. However the real driver for any effective presentation and human memory tends to be precise events that occur (ref) and not the content length. Using the commercial TV analogy, the writers know that they have a certain timeframe to fill and usually have to pad or sequence the critical events throughout the timeframe. When you present, you however have time as an available degree of freedom. The events that you want to present can be driven by your desired timeline, unencumbered by a clock, by an artificial timekeeper, by any needed commercial requirements.
When you deliver a meeting/discussion, feel free to deviate from the one (half) hour intervals. Act on what feels right. Schedule it for an hour but stop it at 33 minutes allowing a few minutes for direct interaction, questioning, or simply a commercial. Then extinguish it at 41 minutes, allowing the simple act of stopping the meeting to act as an 'event' in peoples mind so that it can be etched as a memory.
And for those who are thinking this to the next step, this is absolutely NOT an argument against storyline presentations, a future topic ... stay tuned.
Segmentation in the perception and memory of events
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2263140
