I know you’re busy! So here’s a quick summary of what I’m chatting about today...
Reading is hard. Everyone’s frazzled.
A summary helps people understand the main points, and take action.
Summaries are great for big documents. Your emails should be so short they don’t need a summary.
Human summaries are best (AI summaries are risky).
Picture the scene…
Your morning alarm goes off and you’re already in panic mode (blood pressure up, cortisol spiking).
Unfortunately you check the news (if you’re even faintly aware of what’s going on in the world, you’ll feel absolutely terrible).
Before you know it, you’re running late.
Maybe you’re in a rush to drop kids off at school (and why did nobody tell you it’s “number day” and they need a full costume inspired by their favourite prime number?)
Or you need to get to the post office, pick up your prescription, and get ready for the big meeting.
So when you finally make it to your desk, you feel like you’ve lived a hundred lives.
Then you confront your inbox.
So. Many. Emails.
Attachments. Reports. Surveys.
There’s no way we’re reading all that…
Linda Stone, who coined the term screen apnoea, found that most of us hold our breath when we check email, texts or work on screens.
And the smaller the screen, the worse it gets.
We start the day stressed. Screen apnoea can push us further into a stress response, causing fatigue, anxiety and complex health issues.
We act like it’s easy.
But reading - or processing information in any way - is enormously effortful.
It requires energy. Cognitive patience. The ability to find your way back after interruptions.1
Most of us are skim readers.
If we’re sighted, we skim the page visually.
(But screen-reader users skim the page too, for example, by jumping through sub-headings or generating a list of all the hyperlinks on a page).
One common skim reading pattern is the F-shape.
Why an F? Because we pay close attention to the top of the page.
The first few lines? We’ll read them closely because we know they’re important.
The rest? Ehh. We’ll skim for keywords.
If you put the important information up front, there’s a much higher chance the information goes in, before your reader gets distracted or gives up.
Working memory is limited.
There’s lots to say about cognitive load theory, but I’ll keep it brief for now:
Putting the important information up front places less burden on your limited working memory.
That puts our limited capacity to work on the most important tasks. Like processing, understanding and remembering information. Then taking action as a result.
More words? More load. Intrinsic load comes from the complexity of the information itself. Extraneous load comes from how it's formatted: long paragraphs, no line breaks, walls of text.2
Have you ever noticed that facilitators often open a workshop by asking you what you know about something? There are loads of reasons for this.
One reason is that “pre-testing” people activates useful mental models or “macro-structures.” It gets you thinking in a specific structure about what follows.
Summaries do this too!
Summaries create a “macro-structure” (Kintsch and van Dijk, 1978) which is basically: a mental model for what’s going on in this piece of content.
If you have a clear mental model for what’s going on (thanks to the summary) you can understand and remember additional detail more efficiently.
Launching into a document without a quick summary is like going into a supermarket without a basket. You can grab items in your hands, maybe, but it’ll get chaotic quickly.
If you go into the supermarket with a basket, you’ve got a container you can easily place information in. You can hold on to your items. They’re more likely to make it to the till, and home without getting dropped on the floor.
Everything that helps people pay attention (like headings, bold key words, bullet points and so on) acts as a signal.
Signals guide our attention to what matters. And they also turn our attention away from un-signalled (or de-emphasised) details (Lorch, 1989).
Un-skilful use of signalling means people forget things you wanted them to remember. (I see this all the time. Busy manager is confused about why their team isn’t paying attention to what they think matters! It’s because they’re not signalling strategically)
Skilful signals guide your reader’s attention to what matters. They remove the “noise” or interference from unnecessary information. And lead to action.
Whether you call it a TL;DR or an executive summary, quick summaries help people.
They’re great for big documents like reports, white papers or even for pitch decks.
I keep saying how great they are, so you might think that I love a quick summary at the top of every little functional email or instant message.
Nope!
That’s a bad habit to get into.
Your day-to-day emails should be so concise they do not need a summary.
Your day-to-day emails should be so concise they do not need a summary.
3 sentences, maximum.
I repeat: you should not need a summary for your day-to-day emails or instant messages! Just get to the point.
If you really must add more detail to your email, write what Kim Arnold calls a mullet email.
(Business up front, party in the back.)
That’s a quick message, with more detail at the end.
(Quick message) Hi! Can you fill out this survey by Thursday at 5pm? This is so we can share results with the team on Friday.
(Tail of the mullet) If you’d like more information about who we’re surveying, why and how we’ll analyse the data, here’s a guide explaining more.
Loads of us are using AI to summarise long documents.
Be careful!
There are documented cases of AI tools being used to embed vendor recommendations, a practice sometimes called “AI recommendation poisoning.”
When you use a 'summarise with AI' button, hidden instructions can be downloaded that nudge your AI agent to prioritise specific products in future.
So if you use AI to create a summary, paste the text in yourself rather than feeding it through a built-in 'summarise' button.
But honestly? Human is best.
Summarising content can be incredibly hard. I get it!
For some of us - including many autistic and ADHD folks - filtering what's relevant is genuinely harder work, not a skill gap.
So I’m absolutely not saying this is easy, or we “should” all be able to do it.
If you can, give it a try.
Summarising your own content helps you spot problems. It strips out unnecessary detail. It makes you a better writer.
And when you do it well, people notice. It signals that you know your material well enough to distil it - and that builds trust, respect and credibility over time.
Big documents need a quick summary.
A summary up top helps people understand, remember and use information. So they’ll do what you want them to!
Your day to day emails should be so concise, they don’t need a summary.
I’m focused on 3 areas of communication at the moment. I’m helping people to:
cut through overwhelm
have difficult conversations and
respond to discriminatory language.
Want to help your team become super-communicators? Want 1:1 coaching, a lunchtime talk, or someone to talk through your communication woes with?
Interruptions do not always come from outside. For example, I have OCD. So I can be reading in a quiet room and still face constant, stressful interruptions… just from my own thoughts!
A very popular stat attributed to Nielsen Norman group says that every 100 extra words on the page increases cognitive load by 11%. I believe that specific figure is a zombie statistic (an inaccurate or out of date statistic that “lives on” because it keeps being shared). But I’ve done enough user testing to know that extra words massively increase page abandonment and user stress levels, so the correct statistic could actually show a much bigger effect!
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