Brevity and Better Business Behavior

Better mind your manners: Don’t be lazy, late or long-winded.

In the same way you expect professionals to be on time and work hard, you also presume they should quickly get to the point. It strains your mind when they can’t or don’t.

When it comes to brevity in business, there’s much room for improvement: Shorter meetings; fewer monologues; more concise e-mails; tighter updates; and more compelling presentations that make a point.

Being brief is quickly getting on executive’s short list of essential business manners like punctuality and industriousness. Here are four forces that are driving their appetite for less:

• Information Inundation: Professionals are flooded with a firehouse of information every day and are beyond the saturation point. They check their smartphones 30-40 times an hour, get over 300 e-mails a week and are consume more data every day than people did in a lifetime in 1900.


• Inattention: Attention spans have dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to eight seconds today. They can’t focus long enough if you aren’t succinct.


• Impatience: 74% of professionals admit that if you don’t get to the point within 60 seconds, they lose interest.


• Interruption: The average worker is interrupted 50-60 times a day and 40% of the time the task is not resumed afterwards.

Their relief is when you’re brief. And being brief is now essential in business.

Brevity in business is a matter of preparation, responsibility and respect. Do you take time to remove what’s inessential? Do you feel it depends mainly on you to get to be concise? Are you deeply concerned that you might waste people’s valuable time and attention?

Successful professionals love it when those around them can readily get to the point – and get exasperated whenever it’s missing.

Brevity is the new manner of doing business in the information economy. And it needs practice like any other attractive habit.

Enough said.

via Business 2 Community http://www.business2community.com/leadership/brevity-better-business-behavior-0665374?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=brevity-better-business-behavior