Boss told me my reports were too long, so I cut them down to one page

My manager sat me down last month and said 'I'm not reading five pages of data, give me the highlights.' I started summarizing each project into three bullet points and one chart. Now my weekly updates get read in under two minutes. Anyone else had to shorten their work output after feedback like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

elizabethhayes17d ago

My buddy Sarah had a similar thing happen at her marketing job. She used to write these long weekly summaries with every single detail about their campaigns. Her boss finally told her to just keep it to a few sentences and a graph showing the main numbers. Now she sends a Slack message with the top 3 numbers that moved and a quick note on why. She says it's actually better because people actually read it instead of just deleting the email.

charles_kelly4317d ago

lol @elizabethhayes that's exactly it, people just skim and move on. It's like how nobody reads a full menu at a fast food place they just look for the combo number they always get.

margaret_gonzalez2516d ago

And that's exactly it, people just want the cliff notes version at this point. Honestly I bet half the stuff I post online gets read for maybe 3 seconds before someone scrolls past. It's like we've all got this collective attention span of a goldfish now. Your friend's boss was smart to tell her to cut down the reports. Nobody wants to read a novel about marketing numbers when they can just look at a graph for 5 seconds. Makes you wonder why we even bother writing long stuff sometimes lol.