Rough length, not a stopwatch

Ask for a rough length - "a minute or so", "take your time, a few minutes" - rather than an exact one. A range gives a judge everything they need to plan a take; "exactly ninety seconds" makes them watch a clock while performing, which buys a stiffer clip, not a better one.

Why a range works better than a number

A judge builds a clip out of beats: a greeting, a response to what you sent, the register itself, a close. Cutting those beats to land on an exact second count means either padding one to fill time or trimming one that was doing real work. A range - "a minute or two," "take your time" - leaves the judge free to let the register run its natural length, which is the length that actually lands.

Pinning an exact figure does not make the clip more targeted. It makes the judge choose between honouring your number and honouring the performance, and the performance is what you are paying for.

What to write instead

Three shapes cover almost every request: short and punchy, a couple of minutes, or "however long it takes to say it properly." Pick the one closest to what you want and leave it there.

What over-specifying actually costs

An exact number does not just constrain the performance, it changes how the judge has to work while recording. Watching a clock instead of the register means more takes, more editing to hit the mark, and a result that sounds edited to length rather than performed at its natural one. Keeping time is a task of its own: in experiments by Laera et al. (2024), hitting a time target during another activity depended on how often people checked the clock, and checking less made them less accurate. None of that shows up as better value for the extra precision - it shows up as a stiffer clip, if it shows up as anything a viewer would notice at all.

There is also a quieter cost: a judge reading an oddly precise instruction has to decide whether you actually mean it or whether it is just how you write. That small uncertainty is itself a kind of friction, and friction in a brief tends to get priced or hedged around rather than ignored.

When precision genuinely helps

There are real cases for a ceiling rather than an open range - wanting something you can watch in a short break, or simply preferring shorter clips as a rule. State the ceiling and leave the floor open: "under ninety seconds is ideal" gives the judge a boundary to work inside without demanding they hit a specific mark. That is still a range, just one with an edge on one side, and it reads completely differently from "exactly ninety seconds."

Where length actually gets decided

Length is also the single biggest lever on price, so a vague instruction here is not sloppiness, it is giving the judge room to size the job honestly. The rest of the brief works the same way: state what you want addressed, then get out of the judge's way on how. If you are still deciding what belongs in the brief at all, Rate Cock's guidance on commissioning is the place to start before the length question comes up.

None of this is unique to a length line. An algorithmic score is exact by design because a machine has no beats to protect; a person does, and the brief should leave room for them. A tool built to return a number, like the ones that score consistently every time, has no performance to pace either, which is part of why it can take an exact instruction and a human judge should not be asked to. If a number is genuinely what you are after rather than a performance, a proper measurement settles that question outright and makes the whole length conversation moot.