Writing to give the gift of TIME.

When I first thought about Ndubuisi Ekekwe’s post…‘How To Outperform And Win Your FUTURE’….

I realized that it was being delivered with the usual capacity to be compelling, and with dexterity of language that we have become so accustomed to from an individual we simply call ‘Prof’.

When we look at the piece, we see that it is not an original idea. It is basically a post on time management, and many people have produced work on time management from short quirky ditties all the way back to the Time Study work of Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Motion Study work of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, which together yielded the concepts of ‘Time and Motion Study’

But when I see ‘The Prof’ wading into a topic that is ‘Red Ocean’, I know this must be something that is close to home, and he thinks – regardless of who has already spoken, it needs revisiting, because not enough people are listening.

I will give you the opening salvo of his post:

‘I work hard daily to be in charge of seconds, minutes and hours of the day’ -BOOM

‘The biggest professional victory is victory over your time.’ – BOOM

‘If you master your time, you will win your future.’ – BOOM

‘A man who cannot manage his seconds will wander through the boundless of time.’ – BOOM.

Now let me leave that there for a moment, we will come back.

Have you ever visited a site and found it didn’t tell the whole story on one page? You are only barely introduced to the topic and there is a NEXT button that needs clicking…

You click next, and does the story finish there? No! You find that the information given is actually very little and words have been deliberately without substance to create suspense. As you click NEXT, and then NEXT again, you begin to get increasingly more frustrated as the pages continue. Still, you feel you have already invested in the situation, so you continue, each time, hoping the next page will be the final one, to reveal all.

Why do they do this? Well, they get the visitor to scroll through as many pages as possible to get click-through for advertisement revenue. These days of course, I know the engagement model when I see it. I haven’t visited a site using this ploy for several years.

Why? Because they steal your time.

Now there is a new phenomenon on LinkedIn, which is called Carousel. I don’t read a post if it uses the carousel feature. Why?

Because it is inefficient in how it presents information. It gives a very limited amount of information on one screen, and then the reader needs to click to get to a new screen within the carousel. Eyes work faster than fingers do. This is like the difference between having a solid state hard drive (SSD) in a phone, laptop, tablet or PC instead of the older mechanical drives.

Just that one change makes the performance of the device much, much faster.

As content creators, we can help readers to be more efficient by understanding that eyes work faster than hands. This means eliminating as far as possible, the need for the reader to click or scroll.

Lately, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in posts in LinkedIn. Content creators are treating every line they write as if it deserves its own paragraph. Sometimes they even separate a line with two empty lines. This has the same effect of the web pages with serial need to click ‘NEXT’ and the unnecessary clicking or side swiping for the carrousel feature.

This is STEALING people’s time.

Every line in a post cannot be a BOOM line.  When the construct is that every line is a BOOM line, there is no BOOM line! This is just inefficiency introducing more scrolling… increasing the ratio of finger work to eye-work and slowing the reader down. It isn’t about the overall length of your article necessarily. Long and short articles have value in context. It is about making efficient use of space and punching the maximum amount of information into the least amount of space, to reduce clicking, scrolling, and eye travel.

As we look back at Prof. Ekekwe’s piece, we see the huge humility within which four genuine BOOM lines have not even been put on a pedestal to stand alone. Meanwhile other creators are giving BOOM status to lines which are, at best, pedestrian.

I can look at a 20 line paragraph of a ‘Prof’ piece and absorb it in 2 seconds without scrolling or even moving my eye focus.

In the piece, through good use of space and condensing his presentation, he is putting readers back in charge of their time, so they can onboard more knowledge for less of life’s premium currency.

Avoid content delivery strategies which deliberately seek to slow down the pace at which the reader/visitor can absorb information. If you see yourself as someone that can create ‘great content’ then don’t forget to put your readership back in charge of their ‘seconds’

Because if you don’t, they don’t want to be that victim of time Prof Ekekwe warns of. The one who for failure to manage seconds,  ‘will wander through the boundless of time.’

Perhaps their last click will be for the unfollow button for your profile!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_motion_study

How To Outperform And Win Your FUTURE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_motion_study