What is your ideal conference talk time (when watching online) (poll)

Just wondering whether you have a preference (I know I do!)

  • Around 15 minutes
  • Around 20 minutes
  • Around 30 minutes
  • Around 45 minutes
  • Around 1 hour
  • Around 1 hour 30 mins
  • 2 hours or more

0 voters

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I’ve put around 20 minutes (although up to 30 would probably be ok). I just find I lose attention after that and there are so many talks out there that I want to watch, having a limit would mean I could get more in! :smiley:

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Yep, 20 minutes is my maximum. After that I start drifting away.

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I’m pretty much used to 45 minute sessions of everything.

When in the office, we have a roughly 40 to 50 minute rate of work before going 10 minutes off screen.

If at home, those 45 minutes do fit very well with the homeschooling schedule of my son and we can easily share the room doing our stuff each, without someone running through the others screen.

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I’m unsure about the question. Are you asking what our ideal online meeting time duration is? Who am I talking to? Coworkers? Loved ones? Pets?

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As I understood it, its about the optimal length of a talk you are watching/listening to.

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Ah, so TED talk, YouTube video, online conference etc.?

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Yes, that’s how I understood the question.

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Yep, sorry… I meant conference talks when watching them online :nerd_face:

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I agree with you, but I more than a little close to 30 minutes. In 20 minutes, I felt liked it’s too shorted.

Even keynotes?

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Doesn’t matter what they are. If the speaker can engage me I’ll likely stay with them for hours but most peoplpe are badly articulated and I just lose interest after a bit.

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This is indeed true, though I answered this poll under the assumption that the speaker picked me up. And even then ~45 minutes is just the maximum. Then I need a 5 to 10 minute pause.

I could endure a 60 minute talk, though that wouldn’t be any joy anymore. And just “pausing” a talk that isn’t meant to be paused, doesn’t make it really better.

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Yeah, you are supposed to follow some bigger line of thought during longer talks and if you have to pause you lose all the momentum and the whole thing becomes pointless.

To this day, at mid-2021, I still have trouble with video educational material. It just exhausts me quickly.

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I tend to have an attention span of about 20 minutes, but I can often get through a longer talk in that time. Most talks spend way too long in the introduction and I find that I can listen comfortably at 1.5x speed, repeating anything that’s complicated.

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I think the point about how the talks are presented and written is a good factor to take into account too - as I’m sure people would be happy to spend a little more time on those.

Perhaps someone should do a talk on how to do talks :nerd: and maybe take pointers from Bonnie Bassler and others like her - I wish I was as captivating and eloquent a public speaker as she is :orange_heart:

Joe Armstrong was also very good:

Although I’d still prefer talks to be around 20 mins, maybe 30 for keynotes…

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I know right? It’s absolutely awful. “Hey people, you might know me from X, I did Y, I work in Z” and then some sort of awkward nerd jokes that most people care nothing about.

I started understanding why quality private tutoring costs money. I don’t care about your life story. Make an intro of 1 minute or less saying what will you be talking about. Give me context so I can know if I am interested. If I like your talk we can bond later (if I were attending physically, I mean; or if there’s a live chat after the talk).

Most people are just kind of lonely and are bringing their personal life to their supposedly professional lecture which I find extremely off-putting and is one of the reasons I close most YouTube tabs with “talks” (because indeed they are talks and not much else).

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Even though I agree with you and I regularly do not care for the personal introduction, there is also the camp of businesspeople, who see this “lifetime story” as a “proof of expertise” and wouldn’t follow a talk that omits it…

But yes, it has to kept short, and shouldn’t take much more than ~10% of the talk…

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Apparently credentialism is a preferred technique to ascertain expertise preliminarily. I still prefer to gauge the person’s expertise by myself during the talk but I know that I am in the minority.

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I quite like the personal introductions… so long as they don’t go on too much about their company - I think I’d much rather hear about the speaker personally :lol:

I’ve always been interested in people tho, I think I am just fascinated by how we are all so incredibly similar (on a biological level) yet so different and how we sometimes lead very different lives :101:

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