Why are TED talks 18 minutes long (or less)?
31st December 2011
My answer to Why are TED talks 18 minutes long (or less)? on Quora
I imagine it’s because enforcing a shorter talk time results in consistently higher quality presentations, by forcing speakers to carefully structure their talk and strip out any unnecessary details.
A similar logic holds for five minute “lightning talks”, which are extremely popular at technical conferences. Only having 5 minutes forces people to get straight to the point and stay there.
More recent articles
- Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark - 16th July 2026
- The new GPT-5.6 family: Luna, Terra, Sol - 9th July 2026
- sqlite-utils 4.0, now with database schema migrations - 7th July 2026