16. Time Is Relative

Has this ever happened to you? You’re traveling 2 hours to visit friends. It’s 2 hours to get there and 2 hours to get back, but the trip there feels much longer.

In his interesting book The Time Paradox, Philip Zimbardo discusses how our experience of time is relative, not absolute. There are time illusions, just like there are visual illusions. Zimbardo reports on research that shows that the more mental processing you do, the more time you think has elapsed. This is related to the concept of progressive disclosure, discussed earlier in this chapter. If people have to stop and think at each step of a task, they’ll feel that the task is taking too long. The mental processing makes the amount of time seem longer.

If your presentation requires too much mental work, then people will think that a lot of time has passed. They will feel that the presentation is taking too long, and they will start to fidget. In order to prevent this, make sure that you have broken up difficult ideas into smaller, easier to understand chunks and that you have activities for people to assimilate the material before adding new information.

Expectations Affect the Perception of Time

Think about the last time you attended a presentation that went over the allotted time. Even if the topic is interesting and the presenter is great, if the presentation goes over the allotted time and/or is disorganized, the audience’s perception will be that the presentation is too long.