This semester I am facilitating 3 classes at a local university, and I have noticed that especially my younger, less experienced students, have a hard time keeping their presentations within the required time limits. However, being concise and remaining within time confines is crucial in the business world.

When today, again, one of my very dedicated students wrote to me that she saw no way to limit a presentation about her home country to 3 minutes only, I responded as follows:

Here's a suggestion to look at the assignment: If your CEO at work would tell you that he could squeeze you into a fabulous opportunity to present a wonderful idea you've been having for some time now, to the board of directors, but that you would only have 3 minutes to do that, how would you approach it?

I next shared with this student the age old story of Abraham Lincoln once apologizing for a fairly long letter he wrote to a friend by stating that he did not have enough time to be brief. Lincoln's statement is, in my opinion, the strongest way of explaining that being concise takes time and preparation. It requires a lot of critical reviewing to choose exactly those things that are most important in a presentation, but it should definitely be possible.

My ultimate suggestion to this student regarding the restructuring of her presentation was the following:

1. First you bullet your main points (no more than three to five).
2. Then you try to say the uttermost essential thing about each point in one single paragraph.
   Once this is done, you should check the length of the presentation thus far: it will probably be somewhere between one minute and one and a half.
3. Next, you can choose one particular point out of the three to five that you initially selected (see point 1 above), and elaborate on that point some more.

Again, the art of a good presentation is to keep it short and sweet, and therefore, to prioritize the things you want to say.

But business is business, and when you have only a restricted amount of time to make your statement, you better be prepared to come out strongly and convincingly. It's not the amount of information you share with your audience that impresses them; it is what you say, and how you present it.

Audiences are usually not as interested in your presentation topic as you are. Their attention span is very short. Remember: they are just sitting and listening, which is a fairly passive state. Hence, like all of us, their mind has a tendency to start wandering as soon as their interest level drops. An abundance of information is the most effective way to lose you audience's interest.

Therefore, try to keep your presentations alive by being piquant, brief, and well projected.

Joan Marques emigrated from Suriname, South America, to California, U.S., in 1998. She holds a doctorate in Organizational Leadership, a Master's in Business Administration, and is currently a university instructor in Business and Management in Burbank, California. You may visit her web sites at http://www.joanmarques.com and http://www.spiritcounts.com