2 Mindful of Mind-filled-ness
L ong story, short. Today’s fast-paced world of information, inattention, interruptions, and impatience requires you to make your point before your audience gets distracted.
Brevity Is Like an Instant Stress Release
An executive coach once said to me, “You’d be hard-pressed to find a businessperson say at the end of the day, ‘I have some extra mental capacity to handle more.’”
You work around people who are mentally stretched. When you are succinct, you instantly make their life easier. And they remember and are grateful to you for that.
The source of that stress? Executives suffer growing pressure from:

1.Information inundation: an unending flood of words, images, sounds, and social media
2.Inattention: an inability to stay focused on one item for more than 10 seconds
3.Interruptions: a steady stream of problems competing for time and consideration
4.Impatience: a growing intolerance for results
This is your world—mine too. And it’s only getting worse.

Battling Overcapacity
People can think clearly when they are safe on land. When they are drowning, however, there is only one thing on their mind: finding a life preserver. The new brutal reality is that people are drowning in information. It floods them everywhere they go.

Executives today wake up in the morning and immediately grab their smartphones to check texts, e-mail, updates, sports, stocks, and news. At breakfast, there are tweets and Facebook posts to read and repost. On the commute into the office, they make calls and send and receive a dozen e-mails, all the while trying to “relax” by listening to music.
They get to work to face meeting requests, more e-mails, funny YouTube videos, the company newsletter, and a few voicemails, and then they jump onto the corporate portal. And the day hasn’t even started yet.

By the time you step into the picture, their attention is severely taxed. More e-mails, texts, meeting invitations, and pop-up reminders keep them checking their phones nonstop during your meeting.

And although you may get a head nod every once and a while, that doesn’t mean you’ve broken through. They’re just being nice.

You need to understand your enemies to defeat them. These four forces are constantly playing against you.

1.Information Inundation—The Water’s Rising

“It’s like trying to take a drink from a fire hose.” That is how one writer described today’s world of information inundation.

An executive explained it to me this way: “I have two meetings per day. They both last an hour. In one group, it takes 50 minutes to get to the point,” she said. “I may or may not have the mental stamina to last that long.”

The other group gets to the point in the first 10 minutes. The remaining 50 minutes are spent in great conversation about the clarity that was produced in the first few minutes.
“The first group didn’t have that sense of clarity and urgency. The second group did and got to the point right up front.”
“Maybe they said similar things,” she said. “At the end of the day, we really liked the second group and we didn’t like the first one.”
Software development company Atlassian reported that the average professional receives 304 e-mails per week.1 According to Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’s annual Internet Trands report, people check their phones 150 times per day

Your audience is drowning ,and brevity is their lifeline.
The Elements of Style is a masterpiece guide to good writing—all in less than 100 pages. In it, E. B. White describes Will Strunk’s vision, “All through [the book] one finds the author’s deep sympathy for the reader. Will felt that the reader was in serious trouble most of the time, a man floundering in a swamp, and that it was the duty of anyone attempting to write to drain this swamp quickly and get this man up on dry ground, or at least throw him a rope.”

In a 2012 article in the International Journal of Communication, Roger Bohn and James Short of the University of California at San Diego reported that, “in 2008, Americans consumed about 1.3 trillion hours of information outside of work, an average of almost 12 hours per person per day.

And the same article reported that the average person consumed 100,500 words on an average day and that workers spent 28 hours a week writing and answering e-mails, searching for information, and collaborating internally

This pace will only increase. The Radicati Group reported in April 2013 that “the majority of e-mail traffic comes from business e-mails, which accounts for over 100 billion e-mails sent and received per day.”

Because e-mail is the main way people communicate in business, “This trend is expected to continue, and business e-mail will account for over 132 billion e-mails sent and received per day by the end of 2017.

Time is even shorter if you are a CEO. The study “What do CEOs do?” revealed that “CEOs spend most of their time (85 percent) with other people. Meetings take up 60 percent of the working hours, and the remaining 25 percent is comprised of phone calls, conference calls, and public events.”
We are always connected—in our cars, at home, at work. Everything is a source of information. The implication is that your mastery of brevity—your ability to get to the point quickly—will make the difference between being heard or not—and your idea getting through or being dismissed.

2.Inattention—The Muscle Is Weakening

This information inundation is weakening people’s ability to focus and prioritize. Prevailing research says that the average attention span is down to 8 seconds from 12 over the past five years.

Being interrupted many times over a long period of time wears down your mental capacity, according to author David Rock. In his book Your Brain at Work, Rock writes, “Change focus 10 times an hour (one study showed people in offices did so as much as 20 times an hour), and your productive thinking time is only a fraction of what’s possible. Less energy equals less capacity to understand, decide, recall, memorize, and inhibit. The result could be mistakes on important tasks.”

Executives from all levels constantly tell me they are exhausted by the end of the workday and feel as if they have attention-deficit disorder (ADD). Their attention spans seem jumpy and unfocused. In fact, some scientists believe that people who are “always on” and taking in information actually experience temporarily lowered IQs—and can experience a temporary drop of up to 10 IQ points

In addition, a group of Stanford University researchers studied frequent multitaskers and found that they have a more diffi- cult time paying attention to the various forms of media they are exposed to than those who only occasionally multitask.10 “When they’re in situations where there are multiple sources of information coming from the external world or emerging out of memory, they’re not able to filter out what’s not relevant to their current goal,” said associate professor and study author Anthony Wagner. “That failure to filter means they’re slowed down by that irrelevant information.”

Think of attention span as a muscle. It begins to tire if we use it all day long in lots of different ways. People’s attention is much stronger in the morning than in the afternoon. And if we treat all information equally, it increasingly affects our ability to hold our attention for a certain period of time.

3.Interruption—The Rate Is Alarming

Researchers say the average worker experiences one interruption every 8 minutes, or six to seven interruptions per hour. That equals 50 to 60 interruptions in an 8-hour day.

We’re also interrupting ourselves. You’ve likely been working on a difficult task when something easier or more engaging competes for your attention. Naturally, we feel like doing that instead. It’s almost Pavlovian.

For example, imagine I’m working in a quiet room on an important project, reading, writing, and developing deeper insights and analyses. Soon I’m thinking: “This is starting to get really hard. It’d be easier to check my phone.” So I stop doing what I am doing.

Or maybe I am reading a colleague’s e-mail that’s a little too long and tough to follow. It’s hard to concentrate, because the writer is not getting to the point. So I decide to put it aside for something less taxing, and I check the other messages or text someone.

Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, found that the average worker spent 11 minutes and 4 seconds on a task before being interrupted or interrupting himself or herself and switching to another task. Mark explains that once interrupted, it takes an average of 25 minutes for a worker to return to the original task

In fact, an average worker loses 2.1 hours per day to “unimportant interruptions and distractions,” according to a study by Basex. Interruptions come at a high cost to businesses—specifically, to the tune of $588 billion a year in lost revenue.

E-mail is a big interrupter. A study in the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction by Karen Renaud, Judith Ramsay, and Mario Hair report that “office workers who use computers…constantly stop what they’re doing to read and respond to incoming e-mails. It’s not unusual for them to glance at their inbox 30–40 times an hour (though when asked how frequently they look, they’ll give a much lower figure).”

4.Impatience—The Ice Is Thinning

The conditions of today’s workflow have prompted people to expect things to happen faster. For instance, if you’re reading a magazine on a tablet, the typical way to change a page is to flick your finger. It’s so easy. People are carrying volumes of information on a thin tablet and can navigate this information by barely lifting a finger

When I want to read the Wall Street Journal, I just download it. I don’t have to walk out of my house to get it. It downloads within seconds, and I am reading it on my couch with a cup of coffee made instantly by a Keurig machine. Yet I get easily frustrated if the page doesn’t load fast enough.

We don’t spend much time on any one task. What’s the average time an American spends looking at a Web page? 56 seconds. How about watching a YouTube video? In 2010, it took only 3.95 minutes.

Technology has created an unwritten expectation that things will just go faster. So if you fail to make your point with people as quickly as they’d like, they might lose patience.

This contributes to our impatience with everyday events like meetings—a place where executives spend much of their time. In the book Meeting by Design, author Michael Clargo reports that, “almost 50 percent of meetings fail to use people’s time efficiently…we have twice as many meetings and they last twice as long as would be necessary if they were properly designed and run.”

Google’s approach to this problem is to project the image of a 4-foot stopwatch on the wall that counts down the meeting’s time so it cannot run over.17 The sheer size of the clock reminds attendees just how precious each minute is. Time cannot slip through your fingers when the minute hand is as long as your arm.

What Does It All Mean?

If you’re adding more information, interruption, time, or complexity to others’ day, all you’re doing is encouraging them to tune you out. And if you don’t develop a heightened awareness of this issue, you’re training people to block you out permanently.

These days, it’s no longer possible to get by on the merit of your idea, title, or allotted time. You have to put it in a smaller package and make it easier to consume and digest. You must boil it down and get to the point quickly, or be forgotten.

Your New Reality: There’s No Time for a Slow Buildup

That is the reality today. There’s no time to build up to a big conclusion. To communicate effectively nowadays, you must be able to speak in headlines and grab someone’s attention right away.

Take, for example, a senior vice president of corporate communications who was managing significant organizational changes. He had two CEOs inside of one year, an activist board of directors, and public issues of tremendous significance

The nature of the senior VP’s job was clearly changing, and he needed to adapt. The board of directors—as well as industry and community leaders—were putting him under much more scrutiny and quickly growing impatient.

It was obvious in my conversations with him that the issue of strategic communications was on the front lines. More than ever in his career, he was running out of time and needed to create clarity, urgency, and context for people who didn’t care to wade through mounds of detail. His key stakeholders all had questions and needed answers quickly.

Board members were very busy and had little patience. Their attention was divided between the issues of the senior VP’s company and those of other companies they ran or advised. He explained that their knowledge was a mile wide and an inch deep

“Anytime my staff tries to present to them, the board members are checking their smartphones during meetings, excusing themselves to take phone calls, or just looking at them with eyes glazed over,” he complained. “I realized that my staff needed to hit the ground running and interact with them in a more succinct way, or our company would be seriously affected.”

He continued, “As activist investors, they weren’t interested in the slow build. We need to find a way to overcome their inattention, interruptions, and impatience—to communicate to them in a quick and concise way. It’s our new standard and our new reality.”

“How are you adapting,” I asked, “considering this new standard of brevity comes with the realization that there is no longer the time or attention that we used to have?”

“My new world doesn’t have time like it used to. We have to get to the point faster—because these key people will make decisions for us if we don’t do it,” he said.

Successful people demand brevity and don’t tolerate it when it’s missing

Busy people quickly lose patience when their peers and subordinates cannot get to the point. If you’re buried under hundreds of e-mails and are in meetings all day, you don’t have the time to waste on people droning on.

In their world—and likely yours as well—brevity is the new unspoken expectation.

Test Yourself

Where can you begin to get through to your audience more effectively?

Following are a few questions you can use to assess your mastery of this critical skill. Take a moment to think about how well you and your organization do some or all of the following things:

Examination of Brevity

1.Can I hear an hour’s worth of complex information and summarize it in a 2-minute debrief?
2.Do I write e-mails that get to the point in five lines or less?
3.Do my PowerPoint presentations contain fewer than 10 slides, with plenty of images and little text?
4.Can I translate complicated ideas into a simple story, analogy, or anecdote?
5.Can I expertly deliver headlines like a reporter?
6.Do I speak clearly and concisely—in plain English rather than confusing corporate speech or jargon?
7.Do I know instantly when I’ve “lost” somebody?
In the coming chapters, we will examine how to master these skills and when to use them.

A New Professional Standard
Get ready—it’s a whole new world. If you are used to preparing a seven-course meal, get ready to serve tapas. You and your company are going to stand out and get people’s attention. You are going to be remembered and your ideas are going to be sticky. Everyone else will get left behind. Now is the time to turn the negative force of our attention economy on its head. Lean communication is your new advantage.
Long story, short. Today’s fast-paced world of information, inattention, interruptions, and impatience requires you to make your point before your audience gets distracted.