a little too much showing off can be bad for you

Blame too many cathode rays from my television if you must but today I have a concentration same span of about 30 seconds, a fragile limit that is particularly useful on the Monday morning email cull.

I have one rule and that is if you don't make your point in the preview pane and it's not personal then I hit delete, before the punchline.

I think emailers need to be astutely aware of the fact that people read stuff out of choice: a newspaper article, a joke, a slide show, maybe an Executive summary so the trick is to capture their attention before they drift off on another 'Bahamas moment.'

Communication is the life blood of the organisation, there are many competing mediums and devices but the message which is at the heart of the matter is still the most important aspect and therefore all the old basic rules now apply more than ever, particularly given the concentration spans of the play-station generation.

Hence it's important to focus on saying what you need to say, mentioning it's importance, what's expected and to do it as efficiently as possible - no showing off, personal email doesn't have obvious rules, if you like the person, then no problem you will indulge them.

On Monday morning I got a 2mb attachment with a note that I had to read three times to make any sense of, it was a note sent to some of the senior team by a consultant so I thought that it would be prudent to get the gist of what was expected at least. In true consultant write, it waffled along until I could bear it no more, and I simply opened the attachment, which too was unreadable.

I immediately deleted it and wrote to a friend of mine who was cc'ed in, to ask what that was all about?

He said it would make sense once the author walked me through it and that it was a wall chart and a tracking document but added...that he had nothing to do with it.

I replied that I had trashed it.

Two mega bytes of work and the time that it took to produce it was 'gone in 30 seconds' I just wish that consultants would realise, that some of us are actually smarter than they are and that we don't expect elaborate showing off but rather simple, robust pieces of work within the constraints of our time, one of which is that nobody actively reads 2mb business documents.