Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less

Never in the history of humanity have we vomited more words in more places with more velocity.

Why it matters: This new and exhausting phenomenon has jammed our inboxes, paralyzed workplaces, clogged our minds—and inspired us to create Smart Brevity . . . and to write this book.

Be honest: You’re a prisoner to words. Writing them. Reading them. Listening to them.

• Slacked words. Emailed words. Tweeted words. Texted words. Memo words. Story words. Words, words, words.

• We spend our days listening, watching and reading them, pecking at our tiny screens in endless pursuit of more of them.

Our minds are frazzled by all of this. We feel and see it daily. We’re more scattered, impatient, inundated. We scroll. We skim. We click. We share.

• Eye-tracking studies show that we spend 26 seconds, on average, reading a piece of content.

• On average, we spend fewer than 15 seconds on most of the web pages we click. Here’s another crazy stat: One study found that our brain decides in 17 milliseconds if we like what we just clicked. If not, we zip on.

• We share most stories without bothering to read them.

Then we wait, fidgeting, chasing instant gratification or just more—a laugh, a provocation, a news nugget, a connection, a like, a share, retweets, Snaps. This pursuit makes it harder to focus, to resist checking our phones, to read deeply, to remember stuff, to notice what matters.

• We check our phones 344-plus times each day—once every 4 minutes, at least. Behavioral research—and our own BS detectors—show we underreport our true usage.

• We scan, not read, almost everything that pops up on our screens.

• Mostly we’re feeding a jones for dopamine jolts that come from yet more texts, tweets, googling, buzz, Slacks, videos, posts. Click. Click. Click . . .

What science and data tell us: There is actually little evidence that this behavior is rewiring our adult brains. Rather, we’ve always been prone to distraction. It’s just that now we are getting slapped silly with an explosion of minute-by-minute distractions.

• This exploits two human flaws at once: Most of us are terrible multitaskers, and we struggle to refocus once our attention is yanked away. It takes most people more than 20 minutes to snap back into focus after a distraction.

• No wonder the old ways of communicating fail to land amid this unfolding chaos.

The big picture: We’re wallowing in noise and nonsense most of our waking hours. And flopping over in bed for little dabs and jabs while we sleep. It’s the madness of the modern mind.

This growing fog of words has two root causes: technology and our stubborn bad habits.

1. The internet and smartphones opened the floodgates for everyone to say and see everything at scale, for free, instantly, always. We all won equal access to Facebook, Google, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok. And boy, do we use and abuse it.

We can share our every thought. Post when proud— or pissed. Google when confused. Watch a video on any topic at any time.

2. But people keep banging out emails, letters, memos, papers, stories and books like it’s 1980. Think about it: We know everyone has less time, more options, endless distractions—yet we keep coughing up the same number of words. Or more. Written in the same way we have been writing for generations.

This isn’t new. Mark Twain, writing to a friend in 1871, confessed, “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.”

• Everyone does this. We try to fake it—or show off our smarts—by overindulging in words. We see this at work, in personal emails, in the professional media.

• We’re taught that length equals depth and importance. Teachers assign papers by word count or number of pages. Long magazine articles convey gravitas. The thicker the book, the smarter the author.

• Technology turned this obsession with length from a glitch to a stubborn, time-sapping bug.

The result is billions of wasted words:

• Roughly one-third of work emails that require attention go unread.

• Most words of most news stories are not seen.

• Most chapters of most books go untouched.

The problem is most acute in just about every workplace in America. It does not matter if you work at Apple, a small business or a new start-up, it has never been harder to get people focused on what matters most.

• The work-from-anywhere reality of a world changed by COVID-19 has turned communications into a profound and critical weakness for every company, every leader, every rising star, every restless worker.

• This problem will echo loudly through every organization because a vibrant culture, a clear strategy and swift execution rely on strong communications in a scattered world.

• Stewart Butterfield, the CEO of Slack, told us that, in a hypothetical 10,000-employee company that spends $1 billion on payroll, 50 to 60 percent of the average employee’s time is spent on communication of some sort. Yet no one provides the tools and training to do this well.

The bottom line: All of us confront an epic challenge: How do you get anyone to pay attention to anything that matters in this mess?

Our answer: Adapt to how people consume content—not how you wish they did or they did once upon a time. Then, change how you communicate, immediately. You can do this quickly by adopting Smart Brevity.

The upside for you: You will learn to punch through the noise, be heard on what matters most to you and win recognition for your most important ideas. And you will learn that this new way of thinking and communicating is liberating, contagious and teachable.