An hour? Half an hour? Perhaps twenty minutes? How much of the audience’s time should a good, short presentation really take?
Whenever I hear this question—and I hear it often during the presentation workshops we run—I’ve been giving the same answer for years: a good, short presentation is one that lasts under 20 minutes. That’s the format of TED and TEDx talks, and it’s the length audiences have grown accustomed to.
Of course, some presentations need to be longer—sometimes much longer: training sessions, deep-dive talks, or reports on large projects. We ourselves often produce sales decks for companies owned by private-equity funds; in management meetings with prospective buyers, those presentations can last anywhere from two to four hours.
Nevertheless, the audience’s preference is always the same: the presentation should be as short as possible. To paraphrase Albert Einstein, a presentation should be as short as possible—but no shorter than it ought to be. For me, the 20-minute mark always seemed sensible.
Yet in 2025, Decktopus conducted a study that prompts me to revise this view. The research states unequivocally that the optimal length for short presentations is 10–15 minutes (source: https://www.decktopus.com/blog/top-presentation-statistics-for-2021).
Decktopus’s 2025 study shows that the span of time for which we can maintain full attention is shrinking dramatically. Presenters should therefore get straight to the point, without lengthy introductions.
This confirms the philosophy we’ve championed for years: good presentations—especially reports, briefings, and decks for senior management—should be built on the principles of plain communication. One of those principles is: put the most important things right at the start. Yes, at the very start—not at the end, where we usually place the summary and conclusions. Absolutely not. “Important things first” means we should state our conclusions at the very beginning of the presentation, and then show only the details of those conclusions—where we got them and why they’re valid.
If you want to take your presentation skills to the next level, check out our presentation workshop HERE>. And if you’d like to learn more about plain communication, explore our unique business plain-communication course HERE>.
Piotr Garlej
