Have our attention spans really got shorter, or is there something else going on here?

By Edward Haigh

We like PwC’s 10 minute series. We like it for the way it combines brevity with substance and we like it for the implicit contract it makes with the reader: give us ten minutes of your precious time and we’ll make it worth your while.

So we weren’t entirely surprised when we heard that L.E.K. Consulting were planning a six-minute series. The idea is essentially the same one, even if the contract asks for even less of your time, and it’s based on a two-pronged premise: firstly, that none of us have any time to read stuff anymore, and secondly, that our attention spans are shot to pieces.

It’s hard to argue with that premise, which rather begs the question: where will this end up? Can we expect a five-minute series from EY soon? In fact, didn't they already do one? Will that be followed by a two-minute series from Deloitte and, finally, a 30-second series from BCG? Will thought leadership which asks for ten minutes of our time end up sounding laughably unreasonable?

Hard to argue, indeed, and yet here’s the thing: our attention spans may be shot to pieces but we’ll happily watch a two-hour film and we’ll happily read a two-hundred-page novel. We’ll give a video game our undivided attention for an entire evening, and many busy executives will still willingly spend their spare time watching a performance of one of Harold Pinter’s plays, which, as far as I can tell, are written with the sole purpose of testing how human beings react to the most extreme form of tedium.

That suggests two things to me: firstly it suggests that things which are grippingly, thrillingly fascinating at 5.29pm cease to become remotely interesting, compared with everything else, at 5.31pm. Or, to put it another way, that work’s a bit boring. Mind you T.E.D talks are often pretty gripping, and lots of those are about work. Secondly, and perhaps a bit more convincingly, it suggests that our attention spans aren’t quite as shot to pieces as we might think.

Here’s another thought, then: could the publishers of thought leadership be engaged in a race against time because their content just isn’t good enough?

“But sometimes we have to write about quite technical things, which are inherently a bit boring but no less important” I hear you protest. Do you? Are you absolutely sure you can’t make them any more interesting? Because actually I may have a slightly longer attention span than I claim to have: I just don’t have it for what you’re producing at the moment, and the more you focus on using less of my time and giving me less detail, instead of making your content more interesting, the more you’re in danger of leaving so little of an impression on me that I’ll forget what you told me ten minutes later anyway.