You Have 47 Seconds to Make Your Point. Go!

Advice from Duke experts on how to communicate clearly, quickly and effectively

A graphic of a timer with 47 seconds
Graphic by Travis Stanley

Let’s get straight to the point because you’re probably going to stop reading this article soon:

You need to learn how to capture attention quickly.

Over the past 20 years, researchers have found that the average time people stay focused on a single task has dropped from about 2 ½ minutes to 47 seconds. Thanks partly to unending sources of digital distraction, our attention spans are shrinking.

That means that in the workplace you have less than a minute to make your point in meetings, in presentations, in emails and when you meet someone before they zone out.

Why and how you get to the heart of a matter can make a difference in every interaction.  

Practice Public Speaking

Join a Blue Devils Toastmasters Club meeting.

Communicate with Confidence

“I always argue the most valuable resource people have is their time,” said Aaron Dinin, Senior Lecturing Fellow in Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Duke. Dinin, who has 907,000 followers on Instagram, knows a thing or two about creating engaging content.

“And once you have that perspective, creating content isn't necessarily about figuring out how to say things quicker or snappier or with more pyrotechnics,” he continued. “It's about obsessively focusing on creating things audiences will value.”

How you communicate that information matters, too.

Stacie White, past president of Blue Devil Toastmasters and Case Management Director at Duke Regional Hospital, learned to slow her delivery, eliminate filler words and nervous habits and inject humor with tips and practice at Toastmasters meetings. And humor, she’s discovered, “is a great tool to keep people’s attention.”

Amy Wyron Robinson, a Senior Lecturing Fellow for Duke Innovation & Entrepreneurship teaches Narrative Design, which helps entrepreneurs hone their “elevator pitch.” She urges three guiding principles: 1. Be yourself; 2. Care about your audience, and 3. Cut 50% from what you originally wanted to say.

“You can be the smartest person in the world, but if you can’t communicate your ideas in a way that hooks people, gets them on board with you and compels people to action, then you’ll just keep that idea in your head but you won’t drive the impact that you’re looking to drive,” Robinson said.

Robinson said too many suffer from “the curse of knowledge” and dive deep into the weeds when explaining something orally or in writing.

“The more you know about a topic, the harder it is for your brain to remember what it was like to not know,” she said. “You need to zoom out to the impact: Why does it matter to me? Why should it matter to anyone else?”

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