Everything is too long | Hacker News Reader

Everything is too long

jonsteinberg.com

22 pointsjonsteinberg15 comments

20-30 minutes of content is plenty to satisfy me. I really enjoy the ignite format, where the slides are on a 30sec timer, but they do too many presentations. We need events where there's lots of pressure on the attendees to keep the presentation tight and fewer presentations in the whole event.

I find that people consistently use 10 words to say what can be said in 3.

They talk excessively.

They blabber.

Blabber adds a negative subtext. Not all extended conversation is blabber, even if much of it is.

Peccavi.

"Omit needless words," as William Strunk, Jr. wrote.

Shouldn't it have been along the lines of the "eschew obfuscation" quote:

"Omit all the needless words, lexical expressions and verbage that are not required and so can be removed."

Or such.

I enjoy, and by enjoy, I mean don't enjoy, how you said something specific, leading people not only to reply with three word responses that don't capture your meaning, but also to upvote all the stupid responses that don't actually say precisely what you meant.

Sorry. Having checked out reddit yesterday, I can see what you want to avoid. The pressure was strong, however :)

I vaguely remembered some result about the ideal lecture length, and some quick Googling produced:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7665025

"CONCLUSION: This study shows that a 20-minute lecture was equal to the classic 50-minute lecture in terms of information retained by residents. If future studies confirm this study's findings, medical educators will need to reevaluate the length of lectures to improve efficiency of teaching."

So even more reason to limit the length of time given to people to talk.

Every speaker should try the Ignite/Peka Kucha format.

In fact, if you're planning a talk, first do a 5/6minute version with fixed slides. You'll be forced to really think about what you want to say.

Then start adding what you think might still be needed. It probably won't be as much as you thought. What might otherwise have been a sluggish 45 or 60 minute talk is instead a tight 20-minute gem.

I was fortunate to be part of the MoutainWest RubyConf advisory team last year, and was one of the people pushing for shorter talks. I'd much rather see more topics presented in 20 or 30-minutes sprints than the usual 45 or 60 minute talk.

There are so many ways to get information out to people that you really don't need to explain it all in one shot. People start tuning out anyway.

Cover the essential concepts, point out some striking features, give a fast demo, drop the stand-up comedy patter, give URLs for more info. Then make your self available for questions later.

Exactly !! The ironic part is startup founders and VCs are probably the people who need to network more and learn more from these conferences.....however, we startup founders need to work on our startups too....and more than anyone else, I think.

tl;dr

that's what she said..

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