Attention span

If I am in a meeting, a discussion more than 30 minutes will drive me crazy.

If there are no magic moments in the first 3 minutes of a presentation on a proposal, I will get so annoyed.

And of course in the power-point presentation, if there is no excitement in the bullet points, I will go nuts. And, in some organizations, “they’ insist that presentation must be in a certain format using only certain colours – crazy. It limits creativity and will bore me to death.

In a recent Fortune Magazine article, writer Anne Fisher wrote, the average adult attention span has plummeted from 12 minutes a decade ago to just 5 minutes now.

The Associated Press also highlighted an interesting survey by Harald Weinreich, Hartmut Obendorf, Eelco Herder, and Matthias Mayer entitled “Not Quite the Average: An Empirical Study of Web Use”. The findings stated the average attention span in 2012 was 8 seconds while the attention span in 2000 was 12 seconds.

Why?

I believe technology is partly to be blamed. We want everything to be short. A twitter message cannot be more than 140 characters.

We are also bombarded with too many audio visual alternatives and because we are afraid of missing out, we will move from one source of information to another at lightning speed. With very limited time, we a ‘forced’ to train ourselves not to spend too much time on any one information source.

We will soon prefer not to read long reports and look for the “executive summary”, “the gist’, “the big picture” and we be missing some important details or nuances.

And the devil is in the details...

Soon, instead of watching a 30 minute TV programme we might just prefer the 15 minute version. Why? Simply because we are always in a hurry.

At AWANI, many programmes are now 15 minutes instead of the “traditional” 30 minutes long. And many of AWANI’s 15 minute programmes are doing well both on television and online.

Earlier today I heard an interesting radio ad – sambal belacan express – you don’t need to heat the shrimp paste, pound the chillies and onions to enjoy sambal belacan for dinner. It is now ready in a packet – just heat it.

Stories will now follow the ‘instant noodle’ way.

“Bite” size is the right size.