20. People Learn Best in 20-Minute Chunks

When I am coaching and mentoring people on presentations, I almost always recommend that they watch some TED talks. If you aren’t familiar with TED talks, go to www.ted.com and watch some. These are short talks by accomplished people in their fields. Most of these people don’t earn their living making presentations, but all of the presentations are very interesting. You can learn a lot about effective presentations by watching TED talks.

What’s interesting too about TED talks is that most of them are 20 minutes long. I think that’s one reason why they are so effective. These same presentations stretched out to an hour might not be quite so brilliant.

In fact, it turns out that 20 minutes is an ideal amount of time for a presentation. Maureen Murphy tested this idea in an experiment. She had adults attend a 60-minute presentation at work. She then tested to see the difference in memory and reaction to a talk given in one 60-minute presentation versus the same talk given in 20-minute segments with short breaks in between. Dr. Murphy found that the people enjoyed the 20-minute chunked presentations more, learned more information immediately after, and retained more information a month later.

Plan Your Presentation for 20-Minute Segments

Based on this research, try to plan your presentation in 20-minute chunks. See if you can build in some kind of change every 20 minutes. For maximum learning, what you want is a break every 20 minutes, as opposed to just a change of topic. The best ways to accomplish this are:

• Instead of taking one long break, take several short ones. For example, it is common for a half-day workshop to go from 9 to 11:30 or 9 to 12 with one 20- to 30-minute break at around 10:30. Instead of one 30-minute break, have one 15-minute break and then three short 5-minute breaks.

• When I am presenting, I sometimes introduce short “stretch” breaks that are anywhere from 2 to 5 minutes in length. I just announce, “Let’s take a short 3-minute stretch break.” I time these to fall in 20-minute intervals.

• If you have activities, exercises, or interactions, plan them at 20-minute intervals. Although they are not true breaks, they allow people to assimilate the information just presented.

• If you are presenting for more than one hour, you probably have a break planned. Time the break so that it comes at one of these 20-minute periods.