Of all the things that audiences value most their time has to be the most precious. We need to recognise it, we’re all time-poor; there’s just never enough, is there? Well it’s definitely true for your audience. You may know (it may even be in the day’s programme or up on screen behind you) that you’re due to be talking for 30 minutes (or better still 22), but do they know that you know? So don’t forget to say so. It’s a good opportunity to demonstrate that you really do have their best interests at heart.

If there’s no official time-keeper and you’d sooner not have to manage that part of the job yourself, you might like to ask for a volunteer to give you a ten and then a three minute warning. Or something similar. The idea that ‘one of their own’ is looking after that important aspect will also appeal greatly to your audience.

It’s not just a nicety. The importance of knowing your allotted time and sticking to it cannot be over-emphasised. A speaker who really values it will be asked to speak often, and probably for longer. Overriding your time allowance in the interests of ‘getting it all in’ is not going to win you any repeat invitations.

Here’s how it works. At the start, provided you are clear (and ensure that you really know how long you need – invariably it’s longer than you originally thought or planned) and provided that the parameters are reasonable, you can ‘buy’ almost any amount of time. It’s like a contract and the moment it’s agreed upon a stunningly accurate countdown clock sets off in each audience member’s head. Several of them will have one eye on a timekeeping device too.

As you approach the agreed time limit you’ll need to acknowledge it in some appropriate way and then start summarising and wrapping up in good time. Even if, importantly, even if you genuinely have more to cover. You can ‘buy’ that extra five minutes in a short while, if you’re patient. Or, more probably, you can keep the ‘extra’ for any Q&A session that follows, by posing a question to which that section is the answer. But either way you’ve kept your side of the contract. Vital.

Should you be in an audience when a speaker has already overshot his time allowance you’ll not be the only one fidgeting; look around you. By the time he’s 6 or 7 minutes past the line, there will be a lot of general restlessness visible and perhaps audible too. In another 4 or 5 minutes there will be still more. If he simply ignores the signals they will increase. Furthermore, if he makes the suicidal error of saying at this point “.. but I’ll come to that in a minute .. ” while still not winding up .. check the back of the hall. There’ll be a small knot of people forming a lynch mob, trying to work out whether hanging or shooting is the better option.

The real crisis here, along with those precious tens of minutes you can never retrieve, is that so many speakers are trying, at this late stage, to cover the messages they want the audience to remember and to act on. Meanwhile, the sole objective of the audience is to stop the agony. The two lines, the speaker’s focus and audience’s attention, are pulling apart at frightening and damaging speed. This is not going to end happily.

But, observe the letter and not just the spirit of your contract with the audience and they will treat you with well-earned respect. Should they want more, and those chances are very good, they can always ask some follow-up questions, seek you out later, invite you back or ask you then and there to carry on.

On the topic of the Q&A part of the speech .. watch this space; some further thoughts soon.