Hi folks,
Lengthy post yesterday and I'm tired, so let's let the BB take this one. He's going to explain why we're making the effort around these parts to maintain ~300 words as a daily posting average.
(And let's ignore the crutch that we only count half of Sunday's words.)
Thanks,
Tim
******
My second job was with a large corporation in the Boston area. One reason I was excited to take the job was because of company size. I had plenty of experience in a small, privately run company and I’d developed a number of Business Bro skills native to a leader in a small company – being creative with initiatives, hiring and product expertise, and knowing how to design process from scratch. The chance to get into a large corporation as an entry-level manager was a great opportunity to work on some of the skills that simply don’t exist in a small company – prioritization, process improvement, and organizational communication.
Not everything about my new role worked out but I can look back and say I learned a little bit from the above list. The organizational communication skill was especially interesting. The way executives and top leaders communicated across such a large company was entirely foreign to me. In my first role, the company was so small that ‘organizational communication’ meant the CEO walked ten feet to the left and talked a little louder than usual. In my new role, lengthy emails, internal Wikis, and giant monthly meetings took the responsibility. If we were really lucky, we’d get some PowerPoint slides – eh hem, ‘deck’ – to supplement the communication.
The best idea I saw was a twice-weekly email from the CEO. These never dealt with the highest-level ideas that often rained down on us from his level of the hierarchy. Instead, these emails succinctly described a specific aspect of the business, a few sentences of explanation always accompanied by one chart. I noticed something right away about these emails and so I started tracking them closely. Frequency, topic, and greeting were among the metrics I noted each time a new message pinged my inbox. Over time, I saw no relationship in any of the metrics except one – word count. The word count was almost always in the range of 225 to 275 words, the average right around 250.
This wasn't an accident. There is simply no guarantee of anyone reading beyond 250 or so words at any given time. I don’t say this to accuse anyone of having a bad attention span, it’s because I know from my experience that I simply shudder at the thought of reading more than a few sentences that appear unannounced in my inbox. If I see an email that runs over a couple hundred words, I plan a time in the future to read it.
Readers here should be delighted to know that I’m mindful of this lesson on the rebooted TOA. The audience here and its expectations are a little different than my former workplace but I think we do share a certain sentiment about word count. If I run past 300 words, we'll take a day off. If one of my longer Sunday posts hits a multiple of 300, we’ll just take a day off. And if a really big post pushes the average, we'll sprinkle some extra days off into the calendar. Nothing complicated, just trying to use a little common sense around these parts.
If you suspect we’ve run over 300 today, you are correct. So, thanks for reading, and we'll see you soon. Just not tomorrow.
