One obvious aspect of this hectic day and age is that people’s attention span is much shorter than it used to be. As has been pointed out before, almost nobody reads books the length of War and Peace anymore…
With all the media around us moving to shorter and shorter sound bytes and communication happening in SMS messages and tweets, it would be natural to speculate that the cause of the shortening attention span is the influence – one can even say manipulation – of all these media. And yet it seems to go beyond a simple reaction; because there is a change in people’s inherent ability to process information in a leisurely and thorough manner.
This was pointed out to me by a client who told me he can no longer read a book, or watch a movie on TV, without stopping and getting up every half hour or so. When he was younger, he recalled, this wasn’t the case; something had changed in him. This man is in his fifties, so he isn’t your typical hyperactive millennial with earbuds in his ears and a game controller in his hand; he has every reason to be patient and attentive. And yet he can no longer do what he did before, and what countless generations of his ancestors – and mine, and yours – would naturally do.
I can attest to seeing the same phenomenon in myself… a kind of restlessness that interferes with long periods of concentrated reading. I often cringe when I open some article or blog post and discover it is a long one… and a training manager in a company I know, which still has a real library on the premises (a disappearing breed), told me that employees no longer check out books – they’d never find the quiet time to read them.
The question is, is this change in our mental machinery reversible? Would we be able to find the peace of reading, old style, even if the pressure from outside were to ease up? For instance: will a high-tech knowledge worker who retires revert to the leisurely information consumption of centuries past – or will he also have to get up every 30 minutes, with no real external cause? And what of the kids entering the workplace today, those who had never known another reality?
Do you know the answer?
There is a quote attributed to Mark Ardis: “A specification [or a design, a procedure, a test plan] that will not fit on one page of 8.5-by-11 inch paper cannot be understood“. This is called “The one-page principle”.
Other than being a snappy quote, this is something to consider seriously. A significant aspect of the email overload people suffer is carried in the attachments; indeed, my first inkling that email was becoming a problem, back around 1994, was when a senior manager in my workplace had declared that he refuses to read any email that has any attachments at all. Of course that was over-reaction, but a one-page attachment versus a ten-page one can make a huge difference in the load, especially if you receive a score of them each day. A manager that can induce his or her subordinates to write shorter documents will derive immediate benefit both for self and for the organization. A simple rule like “I won’t read any proposal that is longer than one page” can make a big difference (there was a CEO who was said to have implemented such a rule, though I forget who it was). So can a decision like “all status reports must be written in bullets format and cover no more than half a page”. And for documents who by their very nature require more pages, one can still demand a clear half-page management summary,
Of course, the benefits of driving a culture of short documents go beyond email overload reduction. It promotes excellent habits, such as being mindful of others’ time. And it encourages the keyboard equivalent of the classic “Put brain in gear before putting mouth in motion“.
If you manage people, give it a try!
I was lecturing on Information Overload at a hi-tech company and when I got to the part about “write succinct, terse, clear mails” an attendee raised his hand to ask me, how would that be perceived by recipients in the United Kingdom? Turns out that they had a workshop on global cultural gaps and it included the notion that the British like to start with small talk and only get to the point later; so they ought to find very short emails rude!
Good point, that. Having also worked in a global corporation, I am very much aware of the importance of local culture differences. We too had classes on how to interface with colleagues from distant lands; good thing too, considering my nation’s no-nonsense approach to conversation (to put it mildly). On the other hand, with email loads out of control, who can afford to spend time on polite chit-chat?
I don’t know of any research that looks at correlations of culture and email style or verbosity. If you know of some, let us all know in the comments. I did ask a British colleague, and he tells me that although a polite opening was common in traditional emails, with the growth of smartphones, this nicety is being dropped (often along with any salutation) and the norms in the UK are becoming aligned ever more closely with the US.
What do you think? Do people in your culture welcome excessive brevity in communications – or is it perceived as too abrupt and uncivilized?
Do share!
One affliction of the modern knowledge worker is that people don’t see their children: first, because they work late in the office; and then, because they spend their hours in the home clearing their email.
I was pleased to read in today’s morning paper, then, that the Israeli civil service is going to adopt policies that will mitigate at least part of this issue. A report whose recommendations were approved by the cabinet will make government employ more parenting-friendly. There will be summer camps for employees’ kids, there will be a move to output-based employee assessment (rather than time based), and what I like most – working parents will be allowed to leave at 3PM once a week to spend time with their children.
Of course, a lot depends on the details, which need to be worked out and implemented by a special committee – an inevitable but not always effective route. But if all goes well, one sector of workers in Israel will spend a longer afternoon with their families, and that is a really good thing. As to whether they’ll use the extra time to do email – well, that’s where I might come in… 
