Why an hour on screen is not an hour in a room

Session length is the single most consequential design decision, and most programmes get it wrong by inheriting it.

Length in a room is set by logistics. People have travelled, the venue is booked, the catering arrives at a fixed time, and so the day is built to fill the space between arrival and departure. None of those forces apply online, yet the durations survive anyway, copied across from an agenda that was written for a building. The result is a session that is long because of a constraint that no longer exists, and an audience asked to sustain concentration on a screen for a period that was only ever justified by a room booking.

The useful discipline is to ask what the session is for, in one sentence, and then to give it only the time that purpose needs. Most purposes need far less time than they are given. A briefing that genuinely conveys one change does not need a full morning. A skills session that teaches one technique needs demonstration, attempt and feedback, and very little else. When the purpose is written down first, the padding becomes visible: the extended welcome, the housekeeping, the reading of slides that could have been sent, the long question segment that exists because time remained.

Shorter sessions also change the economics of attendance. A short, clearly scoped session is easy to say yes to and easy to attend properly. A long one is easy to say yes to and easy to attend badly, with the camera off and the attention elsewhere. If the choice is between one long session at half attention and three short ones at full attention, the second option delivers more, costs the audience less and produces a programme people will return to rather than endure.