When to present my amazing idea!

An interesting experiment was done by the Washington Post newspaper with the world famous and superb violist Joshua Bell in the Washington D.C. metro in 2007 during the day (YouTube). Normally when Joshua plays in the finest concert halls in the world his audience has to pay $100s to see and hear him. In the video he was playing for free (busking for tips) and very few people stopped to listen to him play and during the 45 minutes that he played for he earned $32! The reason was that he was playing in the wrong place and the wrong time. The “when” was wrong, people on the metro want to get from A to B as quickly as possible, they do not want to stop and listen to music. They are also not expecting to go to the metro to see a concert during the day. Joshua’s normal audience associates his performances with concert halls in the evening, not the day time in the metro.

I have the most wonderful and revolutionary idea to the problem my boss asked me to solve. Now it is important to think about when I will present my idea.

This is where the day of the year, month, week and time of day is important. As in cooking and in presentations, timing is everything!

For example, in my experience when is the best time to present my idea for how to improve sales in the next financial year or quarter? The answer is just before the start of the new year or quarter. As the sales team will be in the mood to hear the idea and importantly they can then apply it. There is no point presenting the idea in the middle of the financial year when there is not enough time to implement it. Or if the idea can only be actioned in 6 months’ time then they will forget the message and key points I have given them.

Mondays are bad as the client or your colleagues will have just returned from their weekend or holiday, so they will have stories with colleagues to catch up on and emails to read. Plus, Monday is a common day for reporting to be done, so your audience may be focused on completing their internal reports more than listening to what I have to say.

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings are great days and times to present new ideas.

Fridays are the worst day, as the work week is now almost over. This means that your audience will be thinking about the weekend and their energy and concentration levels are low. In the Friday meeting, they will be watching the clock and counting down the minutes until they can go be with their friends and family for the next two days.

People who book meetings on Friday afternoons are the worst people in the world! Seriously, what does the meeting organizer hope to achieve with a 4pm call on a Friday apart from annoying everyone….

The day and time to have a meeting gets especially challenging when the meeting involves attendees from all over the world. Here I need to consider culture, time zone and working hours. For example, in the Middle East the weekends are Friday and Saturday, it is normal that companies in France, Spain, Portugal and Italy shut down for August, lunchtime in Spain is 2 to 3pm or later, lunchtime in the UK is 12:30 to 1:30pm, during the lunar new year Chinese companies will be closed for a week or more, in the UK from mid-December everyone is more focused on the office Christmas party and Christmas shopping than work.

The take away here is that I could have the best idea in the world but if I present it at the wrong time of day it is unlikely that my intended audience will listen.