How long should my speech be? And how can I be more concise? Let me stop you right there. Your goal shouldn't ever be to be concise. Your goal should be communicating ideas that are important to you interesting and relevant to your audience and doing so in a way that's actually memorable. That should be the goal.

So take as much time as you need for that. Now, there was a study done in 1974 by the US Defense Department that said the perfect length of a speech was 17.5 minutes. Personally, I find that complete, utter baloney because we've all seen people who speak for two minutes and everyone's asleep. On the other hand, I've seen speakers talk from 10 in the morning till midnight, the audience wanted more. Why? Because they were consistently interesting.

So I would be careful about trying to pigeonhole your speech into a specific time amount. Now there may be times when you're doing You have exactly 20 minutes, you're a financial conference, you're told you have exactly 25 minutes and five minutes for q&a, and you've got to stick to it. But there are plenty of times in real life where you're talking to your own employees, colleagues and new business pitch. People may have traveled to come see you set up a meeting. And it took them an hour to get there an hour to get back. They're going to listen to you.

They're not sitting there with a stopwatch for three minutes. And the most important thing is that you actually communicate your ideas in an interesting way. So remember the choices in between being really, really boring for a long period of time versus really boring for two minutes. If that's the only choice Yeah, better to be boring for two minutes. But there is another option. And that is to be incredibly interesting, memorable.

For the amount of time you need to convey your ideas. So rather than worry about be concise, or speaking just for five minutes and focus your on your ideas. Make sure they're interesting and memorable, the time will often take care of itself.