Quite Random

Bullets

• Paying
• attention
• is
• easier
• this
• way.

Bullet points cover a multitude of sins. If I write a long process document or proposal, people gamely attempt to read it and visibly glaze over soon after they pass the table of contents. You’ll see that they’re struggling, head lolling to the side, saliva eager to escape from the corner of the mouth, a sudden panicked start at almost being caught falling asleep in a busy open-plan office. I have to say in my defence that the average business process is so mind-numbingly, ball-achingly, soul-sappingly, eyeball-itchily tedious that it would take a row of Tilller girls, fireworks, dancing monkeys and copious amounts of vol-au-vents and hallucinogenic drugs to make it interesting. Even then, you might be struggling.

Maybe I just work around people with the attention span of a budgerigar, but I think it is like this everywhere - it explains why people (mainly men) all over the world ignore instruction manuals for DVD players, cookers and computers, preferring to engage in a process of trial and error - anything is better than reading the manual. Ikea do their best with the assembly instructions for shelving units, but the combined weight of spare screws and dowling rods from Ikea furniture assembled after midnight, by people whose eyes are stinging with sweat and tears after abandoning the instructions, would be enough to tip the Earth off its axis.

I tried once livening up a seminar on data protection by playing a completely irrelevant video of a chimpanzee falling off a tree branch after smelling the finger it had just been using to inspect its backside – the attendees, fairly important people from National Savings and other leading financial institutions, looked more than a little disturbed. Then I introduced bullet points, short, simple, concise nuggets of marvellous wisdom, and they were calm and reassured, positively Hindu cows. No-one should ever underestimate just how little imagination they need to make a good impression in the average business.