Recently I cooked up a little project where I interviewed a few of my friends and put it together into a short video. Watching the footage back, I realized that they are all more to-the-point than me. I'm mostly okay with that, but this also isn't the first time that I've been confronted with my long-windedness. This is also not the first time that I've thought, hey, I'd like to be able to say what I'm thinking and it not take half an hour.

What does it take to be more brief? Why is it important to me? And why has it been hard before?

Why it's important

Being brief shows people that you respect their time. No longer must your audience avoid the awkward situation of waiting around for you to run out of air and pass out before they can dash away. And in your new adventures into brevity, your audience will hopefully see and appreciate your efforts at distillation.

We might not know if people's attention spans are shrinking these days, but there certainly is a lot more competition for attention. If someone wants information, help, or has a question for me, I should try to get to the point before something (usually a glowing rectangle of some shape and size) pulls them away.

Why is it hard (for me)

It's important for me to feel like I'm understood. I won't claim that's a universal human desire, (but surely it's up there). For me, a fear of being misunderstood leads to me being repetitive and over-communicative.

Being misunderstood has an inherent negative bias for me — but maybe that's something that could be re-framed. Maybe, being misunderstood doesn't have to be a bad thing but just a thing that happens; with the right tools, practice, and appropriate iteration, we can undo or repair being misunderstood.

Being brief also means that you're able to trust people to ask you questions or request more information if they need it. If you can't trust them to do that, then you might end up talking at them well more than you need to. Of course, the people we are speaking with may not be in a position to ask the questions they want; so, sure, you can meander around the point forever trying to hit all their unasked questions, but that also means you are making assumptions. Instead, finding a way to make it safer and easier for people to ask questions seems the better option.

How to actually be brief

If I knew how, if it was my nature, I suppose I would just be brief. But instead, I can't really think of any other ways to approach it other than being mindful. Take a breath before you speak. Take a breath and think. Get a Long Winded TimePiece™️, a patent-pending watch that secretly jabs you in the wrist with a painful needle if you talk more than a minute straight.

Slow down—a question or a prompt from someone isn't them asking you to talk for 5 minutes (if they wanted that, wouldn't they ask?). I'll try to save my monologues for the next speech or lecture I'm asked to give.

Verbal processing

Tangentially, I think that I am a verbal processor (although I've never found an official definition of this term). For me, I don't exactly speak in my mind before saying things out loud^[1]. The thought is being formed as I'm speaking, it seems. This can make it difficult to be pithy as I often end up wandering around verbally, trying to find an answer that perhaps could be found in my brain with just a little bit more deliberate time spent thinking, or perhaps through writing my thoughts out first.

The surge of the phrase say less (and its somewhat less popular sibling, say more) seems apt here, but people aren't really using this in a way to tell rambling people to finally put a sock in it.

Either way, I will be working on saying less. Thank you for reading, all posts going forward will not exceed 3 sentences.

Footnotes

1. Why yes, this has led to me embarrassing myself before, thank you. ↩