Squirrel!

Book Review: Smart Brevity, The Power of Saying More with Less

Book by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz

My greatest takeaway: Visual hierarchy will transform how you communicate at work, because this novel will change how you consider order and efficiency, but it might be wrong. Read more.

4 Parts of Smart Brevity

[A snatching grabber]

[Strong Lead (first sentence)]

[Context (why it matters @the top)]

[Photo (choice to learn more)]

Think Audience 1st.

Cut the noise.

Use Action in Your Subjects.

Be Direct _ Offer Context in Your Visuals _ Encourage Copycats… Isn’t that exactly what I just did? I drew the top ideas from a quick book and organized them in the briefest book review I could.

I’m not sure if that works.

First read, I was sold. All of my emails today were quick + short. I utilized 😄 to convey context instead of words. I found that all the personality in my relationships was stripped. I became autonomous, robotic and ruthless.

I don’t think brevity solves it though. Sometimes, I think communication is a diamond. The more carats you have, the greater the complexity, ultimately the greatest result.

While I was reading Smart Brevity, I was also in discussions of how teammates and I could use AI to better free ourselves up from the routine communications tasks in our day-to-days to move onto other tasks. We were in briefings about how AI was used to do things more quickly and better. Yet, in pro-con charts (maybe created by an AI biased robot attempting to increase its control over our company??) we found that the shorter, robotic and monotone communciations lose all of their humanity.

In attempting to be quicker, more eye catching and brief, we found that our souls are entirely lost from our work. Relinquishing all control to something that is unfeeling means that the context (or as Smart Brevity says, “The Why”) is entirely lost. Some things cannot be decided by a computer to make the right decision when humans are involved.

So, I’m a skeptic.

I believe that AI will absolutely be able to free us up for more thinking. I’d love to have less work in the routine tasks, but…

Don’t be so quick to lose the humanity of cadence and not having immediately clear thoughts. The act of learning, just as you are in this thought process of reading a longer blog post is how our brains can sometimes be given the space to absorb and process.

By all means, implement smart communications visuals into your texts to make them more effective, but I don’t believe that you should pop your ideas into an AI generator like ChatGPT just yet.

Less is more, but going deeper sometimes means baking a cake with better ingredients, not leaving out the eggs because you want it to bake faster.