Ted Audio Collective

Have you ever been in e-mail triage mode? Your e-mails got to an all-time high-level.

They're people waiting for you to respond, but you haven't. Partially because you can't

find the urgent e-mail you need to respond to. And all you want is a full day, or heck,

a full week to clean and organize your inbox.

And that day finally comes. You're humming along, feeling good about your progress.

And then you get to that long, multi-paragraph e-mail. It's from an important person, so

you know you need to concentrate. But part of the reason you haven't responded is that

it's so darn long.

This feels like the story of my life. And there are certain names I see in my inbox, where

I know I'm going to get a novel in an e-mail, one that I don't have time to read thoroughly.

In fact, I recently had to send a note back to one of those people saying, I am more likely

to respond to your e-mails in a timely fashion if you keep them brief.

And this tendency to be verbose doesn't only apply to e-mail. We have lost the art

of brevity when it comes to so many domains. I mean, Twitter has a limit of 280 characters

per tweet, but now people do threads. By the way, I can't tell you the number of lengthy

academic dissertations I've read that don't need to be that long.

So how do we recover this law skill of brevity, especially when we have so much on our minds

that we want to convey to the people around us?

I'm Medusa Akinola. This is Ted Business. Our speaker today is Jim Vandahai, the CEO

and co-founder of Axios, a media company that focuses on sharing breaking news with what

they refer to as smart brevity. In this talk, Jim explains how to radically rethink the

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