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Does time play an important role in chunking?
“You can have it all. Just not all at once.”
– Oprah Winfrey
Just as we need to pace ourselves when eating and pause between bites (teenagers excepted), retention of ideas improves when we give them time to get digested.
It turns out that the typical adult human can pay attention when receiving information for about ten minutes. That’s it. After that, our mental mouth is full; we need time to swallow and process before our next bite.
Now consider: How long are your typical demos? Thirty minutes? An hour?
For an hour-long demo, each mental bite of three (typical) to seven (exceptional) ideas is all your prospect can handle at a time. Accordingly, you’ll need to break up your demo into (at least!) six bites – six chunks – of ten minutes each.
But that’s stretching your audience’s ability to pay attention. Chunks of a few minutes yield stronger engagement and spur a real conversation to take place.
Continuing our dining analogy, note that there are significant pauses between dishes in a multiple course meal. Each course represents a chunk and each bite a tasty, consumable component within that chunk.
But it is the pause, along with conversation and a sip of water that refreshes and enables us to start on the next chunk with our full attention.
Next: Losing Attention!
Resources:
Great Demo! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C9SNKC2Y/
- Chunking – page 239, 249
Monty Python, “Three shall be the number…”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IOMNUayJjI
How Chunking Improves Demos – Part 1: Bitesize Bits Are Better