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Coming up next on Passion Struck.
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Often when we start writing, we think we know what we re writing about.
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Literally, it could even be a text message.
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And we think we know what we re writing.
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And as we write, it becomes clearer exactly what we re trying to accomplish.
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And it ends with a conclusion.
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That s the real key point.
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And we end with it.
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So writing can be fantastic for clarifying the way we think.
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helping us understand our own goals and what we want to accomplish with our writing.
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Sometimes we confuse that for the final stage of writing.
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That is the end.
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It is not the end.
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That actually helps you realize what the point of that writing activity was in the first place, which we then should rewrite everything through the lens of now that I know what my goal was.
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Welcome to Passion Struck.
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Hi, I m your host, Jon R. Miles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world s most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.
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Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.
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If you re new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays.
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We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes.
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Now, let s go out there and become passionstruck.
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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to episode 341 of PassionStruck.
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Ranked by Apple as one of the top 10 most popular health podcasts.
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Thank you to all of you who come back to the show every week to listen and learn how to live better, be better, and impact the world.
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PassionStruck is now on syndicated radio on the Brushwood Media Network, and you can tune in every Monday and Friday during your evening commute from 5 to 6 p.m.
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Eastern time.
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Links will be in the show notes.
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If you re new to the show, thank you so much for being here.
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Or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member, we have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans  favorite episodes that we organize into convenient topics that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything that we do here on the show.
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Either go to passionstruck.com slash starter packs or Spotify to get started.
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And in case you missed it, last week I had two great interviews.
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The first was with visionary nature filmmaker and cinematographer Louis Schwartzberg.
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Louis s breathtaking films, from Fantastic Fungi to his latest masterpiece, Gratitude Revealed, have enchanted audiences worldwide, opening their eyes to the awe-inspiring beauty of the natural world.
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In Gratitude Revealed, Louis takes us on a transformational journey, exploring how gratitude can lead to a more meaningful life.
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I also interviewed Dr. Jud Brewer, who is an author and thought leader in the field of habit change and the science of self-mastery.
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We discussed his New York Times bestseller, Unwinding Anxiety.
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New science shows how to break the cycles of worry and fear to heal your mind.
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If you loved today s episode, we would so appreciate you giving it a five-star review and sharing it with your friends and families.
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I know we and our guests love to see comments from our listeners.
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Today s episode is all about mastering the art of effective communication in our fast-paced, hyper-interactive world.
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Do you find yourself skimming through emails and texts, overwhelmed by the constant flow of information?
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Well, you re not alone.
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Busy readers routinely decide the value of a message without fully reading it.
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But fear not.
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In this episode, I have a special guest
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who will equip you with powerful insights and strategies to effectively communicate with even the busiest of readers.
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Joining us today is Todd Rogers, a behavioral scientist and professor of public policy at Harvard University.
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Todd, along with Jessica Lasky Fink, has spent over three decades studying the science of writing, and together they have authored the groundbreaking book, Writing for Busy Readers.
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communicate more effectively in the real world.
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Throughout the episode, Todd will unravel the psychology behind how busy people read and share six research-backed principles for impactful writing.
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Todd will draw from cutting-edge scientific research and share captivating insights from his own original experiments.
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You ll hear eye-opening real-life examples across various fields including healthcare, marketing, management, government, criminal justice, and interpersonal relationships.
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Whether you re a recent graduate entrepreneur activist or a professional using email or Slack, this episode is for you.
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No matter your background or status, Todd acknowledges the need to adapt communication to diverse norms and cultures, striking the balance between precision and personality.
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Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide in your journey to creating an intentional life.
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Now, let that journey begin.
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I am so excited today to have Todd Rogers on PassionStruck.
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Welcome, Todd.
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Hi, John.
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Well, you and I were first introduced by a mutual friend of ours.
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I m not sure if you remember, but it was Katie Milkman.
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And I saw that you re a member of the Behavioral Change for Good team.
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And I was hoping you could tell us about the initiative and why you ve lent your support to it.
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Sure.
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Very happy to be on the show.
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Thank you for having me.
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Katie Milkman and Angela Duckworth.
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started a group called the Behavior Change for Good Network, a bunch of behavioral scientists from around the country and the world.
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All of us are focused on behavior change to improve social welfare.
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I m not sure what the original motivation was, but what ended up happening was she brought all of us together down to Penn.
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We talked about what I think is really the frontier challenge for a lot of behavioral science, which is how do we change behavior for the longer
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term, not just one-off behavior.
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And it became a long discussion across fields and across research programs.
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But since then, or and since then, it has morphed into a network that conducts what they call mega studies, which is there are big social problems like getting people to take up flu vaccinations or COVID vaccinations.
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And a lot of different research teams will propose interventions, and then they ll do these massive tests
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one intervention against another to see which ones work and then scale them up.
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Yeah, it s really interesting because it s getting scientists who often compete for grants and other things to actually work together for the benefit of everyone who s part of the initiative and all of us who can use the learnings to apply them to our lives.
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And I got involved because this whole show is about intentional behavior change because as I was looking at how do you get people to become unstuck and shift,
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You can use neuroscience, you can use psychology, you can use other things, but I found that behavior science provides some of the quickest means to get people to change the micro habits that they use throughout their days.
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So that s what led me to want to get more involved with it.
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But speaking of intentional behavior change, can you elaborate on how your journey of studying behavioral science led you to focus on the science of writing?
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Yeah, I ve either been doing it for the last three years or the last 30 years.
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And since you asked, I will give you the one minute version of the 30 years, which is, I was a political pollster.
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When I left college, I was a religion major in college.
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So naturally, I became a political pollster.
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I don t know that.
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Thank you for letting out half a laugh just so that I m joking.
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The and I became a political pollster, a democratic pollster.
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And I realized there was a science of behavior change not being used in politics.
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And so I went and got my PhD in basically the science of behavior change, joint at Harvard Business School and in the psychology department and in economics and in political science.
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This is actually where I overlapped and collaborated most with Katie Milkman.
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And then left early to start a research institute in Washington.
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It s called the Analyst Institute, where we translate behavioral science into political strategy for progressive organizations, working on things like persuasion, fundraising, volunteer recruitment, and get out the vote.
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And ran hundreds of large field experiments, randomized control trials, looking on best practices and all these things are basically increasing civic engagement.
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And in the process, that is communication with voters.
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So we re trying to get through.
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And almost every intervention, the first challenge is how do you capture and maintain attention long enough to be able to deliver whatever the message is.
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And then I decided I don t want to do politics anymore.
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And I shift to education interventions.
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And I switch back and I m a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government now.
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And
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I decided I want to start doing interventions to communicate to families to find ways to use these kind of same tools to mobilize and support families in helping kids succeed outside of school.
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In the process, started an organization called Everyday Labs that works with some of the largest districts in the US to reduce absenteeism by sending maybe 10 million or more communications a year.
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to families, trying to motivate and empower families to support kids outside of school.
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And then over the pandemic, I shift to how do we communicate with, working with mayors and state legislators and superintendents, how we communicate to our busy stakeholders about important pandemic related things.
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All along, it s been about communicating to busy people, busy voters, busy parents, busy constituents,
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But in the end, I realized, oh, my God, it s the same thing, all of it, every across everything, no persuasive message can have any effect at all, unless we get through.
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And right in a way that busy people can pull out the key information we want them to pull out.
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I love that you brought up that story, because I used to be a senior executive at Lowe s.
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And we had a whole team of behavioral scientists
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some of who were working on analytics for the company, but a lot of them were working with the marketing group on communications with customers and how to properly influence them to shop with us instead of Home Depot or someone else.
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And I find it so interesting.
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Can you discuss how you can use behavioral science principles to apply how busy people read and process information differently?
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Sure.
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So what ended up happening during this time period over the last few years is we re like, well, how do we help leaders communicate with busy stakeholders?
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Originally it was superintendents of schools, then it was mayors and state legislators, and then it s become corporate managers and leaders too.
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And we discovered there are a handful, only six, principals
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for how do we write so busy people read and respond.
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Over the course of my co-author and I, Jessica Lasky-Fink, she s also at Harvard here with me, we ve run hundreds of these experiments where we work with organizations and we test.
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Half get message A, half get message B, and we vary different elements.
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And I ll name one of the six, which I think is a fun one.
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It s less is more.
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So we have run lots of experiments where we will
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cut messages in half, or delete arbitrarily every other paragraph, or ask someone to edit down by 50% their own message, and almost every single time, dramatically increase people s likelihood of reading and responding.
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A very fun experiment we did with the Democratic Governors Association.
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They have 600,000 donors on their email list.
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They wrote a six paragraph fundraising message.
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I said, why don t you arbitrarily delete every other paragraph so it doesn t even make sense anymore?
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It s incoherent.
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And we ll go six paragraphs compared to 300,000 get the original 300,000 get the arbitrarily shortened message.
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And it increased donations by 16% just by making it incoherent but shorter.
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Fewer words is one part of that, and there are other elements.
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But people love that.
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Blaise Pascal or Mark Twain, or it s attributed to everybody, once said, if I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.
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It s this widely talked about, like, witty person describing this principle.
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Well, getting your book, which actually releases today, the day we re airing this episode and the name of your book, just so people know it is Writing for Busy Readers, Communicate More Effectively in the Real World.
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Congratulations to you and Jessica.
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This book was very timely for me because my editor sent me back the proofread of the book and it s too long.
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So reading your book is giving me some ideas of what I need to do to simplify my book so that it ll be more approachable to readers.
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It s often friend of mine, Nancy Gibbs, who is the editor in chief of Time Magazine for a while, says that we need to kill our darlings, which is we treat every sentence like they are a child of ours.
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And it s very hard to think these beautifully crafted
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children, babies of ours in our writing.
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And that s what she thinks of as one of her primary jobs when she was an editor, is helping people kill their darlings.
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I actually, I hate that phrase.
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I shouldn t have said it.
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Now that I think about it and repeat it a few times, it comes off as a little more aggressive than I think either of us mean.
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You live today in an unprecedented age of media saturation and information overload.
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And in fact, you opened the book by discussing how the Pew Research Center surveys found that 60% of adults and 74% of parents reported that they re actually too busy to enjoy life at least some of the time.
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Why did you and Jessica feel that now was the time to write a book to help modern writers and readers break through all these distractions?
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Writing a book itself is a funny thing, right?
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So one of the six principles is less is more.
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Let s say that was the core principle.
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It s not one of six.
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It s funny to write an entire book telling people to write less, right?
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We get the irony of that entire endeavor, which is we want to write a long book to tell people they should write shorter books and messages.
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I ve started training, doing lots of these workshops and trainings with companies and governments and organizations on this content.
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And people seem really moved by it because it resonates, which is everyone has an inbox that is just flooded at every moment with too much.
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Everyone is also trying to communicate with people who have the same problem.
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And I will always start with raise your hand if you ve ever received a text message.
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where you looked at it and were like, I can t deal with this right now.
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Everyone s hand goes up.
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And I say, keep your hand up if you ve ever not gotten back to it.
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Meaning even our shortest mode of communication, we still postpone and still they re too complicated to respond to.
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And everyone keeps their hand up.
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It resonated with people.
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And so we wanted to write a book to flesh out the details of what we and other fields have learned about how to write to busy people read.
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And then we also wanted to let people, cause it seems to resonate, let them understand the sort of nuance and structure of it and in a sort of entertaining and enjoyable way.
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And it was fun to write.
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I love how you had the different cartoons in there as well to express and link up some of the ideas that you were bringing in the book.
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Cause I found them to be very helpful.
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I want to go through some background before we get into more of the principles and talk about effective writing.
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You guys write that our brain s processing capacity is limited, which means that also our attention is limited.
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What are the implications of this limited capacity on how we interact with the world around us?
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It s a great question.
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It really is the foundation of why this work is useful, which is
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is busy.
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And everyone is what you might call satisficing.
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It s what behavioral scientists call satisficing.
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It s this idea that very often in a lot of situations, people are trying to do the most efficient, fastest, good enough version of what they re doing.
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And so when you read, people have limited attention, limited time.
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And so what happens is they read and they go as fast as they possibly can.
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barely reading as closely as we would want them to.
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And they often move on without even pulling out the key information that we wanted to convey.
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So imagine you write three paragraphs to someone, they look at it, they look it over, they dart around, they scan, they jump around, and then they decide, they think they figured out what it was about.
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Oh, it s about our lunch tomorrow, got it.
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but then buried in there with some other question that they d never pulled out.
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People s limited attention and limited time leads them to be pretty aggressive in jumping around and skimming through the things that we write.
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It could be emails, could be text messages, could be reports or briefings.
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The strategy people have developed is to see if they can pull out as much information as they can as quickly as they can, often without pulling out the information we wanted them to.
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It s interesting because in the beginning of the book you also draw a parallel between singing, which I m not very good at, and writing, which I m a little bit better at.
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How are the two related?
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We draw an analogy in there that I don t love, but the idea is that we all think we can do it.
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We put a lot of effort in.
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John, can I ask you, what do you think of the analogy with singing?
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I m a terrible singer and my kids remind me of that every day.
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And so I become pretty self-conscious, although everybody thinks they can sing Taylor Swift songs.
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What did you think of the analogy with singing?
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Well, what I thought is that
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The best singers that you hear, and if you especially think of opera singers or people who are on Broadway, many of them were probably born with a great voice, but they had to really train it to perform at the levels and the frequency that they re using it.
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If not, it wouldn t have the impact or the longevity on the audience who are hearing them.
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And I think the same
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parallel could be made to writing.
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I remember when I was in the military, I had this boss, Commander Fitzsimmons, who was a stickler for writing.
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And when I started writing these memos that would go out to the ships and troops that were supporting us, I
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always writing him too long and I wasn t getting the main points across and he really painfully honed in on me that you ve got to make these things simple you ve got to make them readable these people don t have all this time in the world but more importantly you re giving them an order so you have to be very explicit in what you re telling them and I think the same thing could be said about
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some of the best songs that we hear and why an Ed Sheeran song or a Taylor Swift song responds so well with us compared to others.
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And I think in their case, a lot of it has to do with the combination of their singing and the writing that goes behind that singing.
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So that s just how I looked at it.
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Yeah, that sounds right.
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Like we, another aspect of it, which I think we can drift from the narrow singing analogy to, we are taught how to write well.
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And in the process, in school and at workplaces, we are taught the intro topic sentence, sometimes how to write essays, how to write flowing prose.
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But that is different than writing effectively.
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And writing effectively is writing in a way that accommodates the way our readers actually read.
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We think that this is a real breakthrough of insight that we had, which is
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Everyone is taught how to write well, but it s different than writing in a way that accommodates how busy readers skim.
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No matter how good you are at the first version, it s another step to learn how to write in this way that reflects the reality that for practical writing, we need to write in a way that accommodates the busyness and strategies that readers actually use.
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I ll just highlight three examples of what I thought was very effective writing.
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One of those happens to be Mark Manson and the way that he writes his books.
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I might not agree with everything he has to say, but the way he writes has been extremely effective at shifting people s views about everything from hopelessness to the purpose that we have in life.
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I think another great example is someone you actually bring up in the book, and that s Adam Grant.
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I think in his books, I m a huge fan of him.
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He does a very good job of breaking down very complex ideas into very easily digestible fragments or thoughts that he conveys.
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And then the last one I would use would be Robin Sharma and I think the 5am club was a great way of storytelling and breaking down things so that this idea of intentional behavior change starting with micro habits by getting up early became an effective way of understanding.
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I like it how you define it as the power of effective writing is the ability to transmit a thought or goal from your head
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into someone else s head, and most importantly, inspiring them to act, which is, I think, those of us who are writers, what we re all trying to get people to do.
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All those authors are excellent writers, but they also create structure in the writing, which makes it easy for people to move around within the writing.
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where they ll have headings and summaries and a table of contents that s informative about what the writing entails.
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One of the principles of effective writing for busy people is making it easy for people to navigate.
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Books are its own category, which we try to make our book, Writing for Busy Readers, this sort of
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easy to jump around and also easy to know where you are and navigate around and through.
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But especially the sort of professional writing, whether it s reports, emails, even text messages, these same things, making it easy for people to navigate.
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For example, in a text message yesterday, I was sending a friend, we were coordinating something, and I had two questions for her.
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One was, where are we meeting?
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And the other was, what time?
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And actually there was a third, which was whether I should bring a certain thing that I was planning on bringing.
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And so originally I wrote the text messages like running thread that just went left, left, left, left.
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But I realized what was going to happen was one, she was going to defer reading it at all because it was just a long message.
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And two, she might only respond to one or two of the questions and not all three.
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I had to create a structure to make it easy for her to figure out, pull out instantly that I m asking three different questions.
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So I actually ended up numbering the questions and put them in different messages.
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I said, friend, we re looking forward to our lunch.
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Next message.
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One, what time are we meeting?
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Two, next message.
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Two, where?
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Next message.
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Three, should I bring this thing?
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There isn t a right answer for how
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But the idea is just editing it from the perspective of the reader.
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How do I make it as easy as possible for them to pull out what I want them to get?
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And that s the sort of miracle of writing that you re referring to, which is I have these goals.
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I want you to understand my goals and help me fulfill them.
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And somehow I move my fingers, it turns into these little digital screens, they get sent out over the interwebs, and then you somehow translate it into, and there s so much room for loss in that.
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And it s a miracle that it ever works, let alone that it usually works.
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Oh it is and that s why in some ways it s hard for me to understand how anyone can be a master of effective writing because I really do think it is an art as I have
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tried to hone my skill especially using medium and see these other people who have 20, 30, 40,000 followers compared to my measly number that I have.
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I read my writing and I feel like it s so good and then I read theirs and it s just
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In some ways, they get their points across so much more profoundly than I do.
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So it is always a skill that I think all of us can get better at.
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And I think to your point about texting, we often text way too much instead of the most important things that should be concise and get the recipient to act on, so to speak.
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Jessica and my goal through this whole program, I m working with the
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high school English teachers and college communications programs and companies, the communications companies.
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The goal is for everyone, everywhere who writes anything.
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So just have a final round of edit, which is how do I make it easier for the reader?
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I don t know if anyone is ever going to be a master of it, but we re always going to be getting better at it.
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The big picture is it becomes, it s more effective for me as a writer because it helps me achieve my goals.
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It s just kinder.
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John, you and I are communicating to set up the session.
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And your writing is great and it s direct and to the point and when there s a lot, it s structured in a way it s easy for me to pull out.
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It saves me time so that I don t have to read through four paragraphs and be confused or give up and then figure out later that I missed the appointment.
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So it s more effective, it s kinder, and it s also more equitable and accessible.
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So one thing that most people don t realize is that the reading level of most Americans, if you were to guess, I guess you ve already read the book, but many people would be surprised that a lot of research suggests that the 50th percentile American adult, means like the 50% or higher, 50% or lower, reads at a ninth grade reading level.
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When we write complicated, nuanced,
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long sentences, it s inaccessible to a big chunk of adults.
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20% of US adults read at a fifth grade reading level, which just means like when we write complicated, long, unnecessarily verbose, highfalutin language, it is inaccessible to many of our readers.
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So it s more effective, it s kinder, and it s also more inclusive.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I couldn t agree more with that, and I actually had read somewhere that it was at an 8th grade level, so the 9th grade level is actually a little bit higher than I came into reading your book, understanding the situation.
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SPEAKER_01
Well, one of the things you guys write about is that the underlying science behind effective writing is the same in every situation.
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And I found that very interesting.
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However, to put the principles into action depends heavily on context.
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Can you elaborate?
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Because I thought this was a really interesting point.
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Yeah.
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So for example, you were in the military and you were talking about Commander Fitzsimmons.
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And he was coaching you on how to write for him and or how to write for others.
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In the U.S.
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Army, there is a regulation that requires or mandates that writing in the U.S.
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Army has bottom line up front, BLUF, bottom line up front.
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If you are a enlisted person,
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are a general communicating to an enlisted person, bottom line up front, first sentence is the main point.
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Incredible.
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That seems super efficient, wise, a great practice, but especially a great practice to establish as the universal norm in our organization.
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Because if you don t have it as a norm within the organization, a lower status person, like an enlisted person communicating to a general, there will be ambiguity in how that person is interpreted.
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When they send a message, first sentence is, I wanna have a meeting with you about the plans for next week.
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You and I have never met, but whatever, I m a big fan of your work, whatever.
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Starting with the bottom line up front, in an environment where it s ambiguous, whether that is appropriate, can come off as aggressive or too direct or presumptuous.
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And so the people who get harmed by it end up being the lower status, lower power people
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because they have this ambiguity about how to communicate.
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And so what the optimal thing to do in an environment like that is not have the bottom line up front.
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If you don t know, that is what the person is used to.
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And so instead you have a paragraph of preamble, and then you ask your question.
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It s less likely to get read, less likely to be responded to, and it burdens the reader.
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But what s cool is the bluff in the US Army completely makes it clear for everybody.
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And that context allows that kind of direct communication because it protects from the kind of penalties you might have from being perceived as too direct or too aggressive or presumptuous.
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So your question was about context matters.
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The context matters.
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What are the norms?
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What are people expecting?
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Who are you as a sender?
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How are people going to interpret you?
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And so there aren t universal laws for what you should do, but there are universal laws in that everyone is skimming what we write.
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So we need to, as writers, just navigate how do we make it easy for them while also conforming to whatever expectations there are.
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Well, and I think a great example of this that you highlight in the book as it relates to context is the story of Airbnb s stock going public and how it s a great example of what happens when messages are written without a key focus or to your point, bluff that a busy reader needs to understand.
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Can you just talk about what happened here?
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Because I think it s really.
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an unfortunate thing that could have gone a completely different way for them, but more importantly, many of the users of their system.
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So Airbnb went public from the stock market.
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Often when this happens, the company will sell its shares for $10 to people who buy it.
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That s what they will launch at.
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And then there will be a bump initially in the first day or two.
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And so it might go up to $15.
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There s typically a large bump initially.
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And so what Airbnb wanted to do was invite their hosts, the people who offer up their homes for rental, to participate in this initial public offering on the stock market.
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The way they did that was they sent an email to all of their
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hosts that had a subject line that was uninformative and seemed like the normal bureaucratic disclosures where it was, I think it might ve been directed share offering for hosts.
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And that host report, they would frequently get messages that look like that.
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And then it would be new regulations that Airbnb is enforcing on hosts or imposing on hosts.
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And so many people reported just deleting it or filing it away or not being particularly responsive to it.
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What they didn t realize was that if they had read into the second or third paragraph, they would have learned that they were being offered effectively a discounted price on these stocks.
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This stock was about to be issued.
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And for many of them, it would have amounted to $10,000, $15,000 of benefit.
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They only reported afterwards learning about it when there were stories written about how many people like them had failed to read it, failed to respond, failed to take advantage of it.
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SPEAKER_00
Because the subject line there is,
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Some bureaucrat ease directed share offering for host consideration, not something like benefit from our IPO or profit from our IPO or special offer.
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SPEAKER_00
I don t know, something that they might ve paid special attention to.
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SPEAKER_00
So they had come to expect that subject lines that were bureaucratic from Airbnb were bureaucratic, not urgent.
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And in the process missed out on potential significant gains.
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Yeah, it s really an unfortunate situation.
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And I had something similar happen to me on a company that I had grants in and then they were getting money in from a new acquirer.
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It was requiring you to act, but none of the messaging alerted you to the fact that this was time sensitive or laid it out specifically.
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What were your options?
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How do you need to interact with this?
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And so luckily I caught it and called up and talked to their CFO, but I know a lot of people completely missed the message in its entirety.
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SPEAKER_01
So this communication is so key.
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Sometimes it feels like these communications are intentionally opaque, that the writers
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don t want us to understand it.
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I don t know if you ever get these postcards that you re part of some class for a class action lawsuit where it s like you bought this product on Amazon and 15,000 other people bought this product and every person is entitled to $1.25 if they do this thing.
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But it s written in graduate reading level with completely legal ease.
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in seven paragraphs.
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I work on writing, and I often try to read these things and can t make sense of it.
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I don t know whether they re legally required to write in completely inaccessible ways, but my suspicion is they must have some kind of incentive for us not to be responsive.
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SPEAKER_00
And one of the things that Jessica, my co-author, added as we were writing the book, which I think is really right, is if you encounter
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very difficult to read text other than maybe pure legalese, like where you re reading terms and conditions.
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But where you get something and it s really hard to read, it s probably a time to perk your ears up.
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They don t want you to read it.
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And I don t know what their motive is, but everybody has their own motives.
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But I think it s actually a pretty good sign that you should probably read more closely, for example.
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What other people have done this research on CEOs, when they do their quarterly earnings calls,
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When they are committing fraud, we later learn, they tend to speak in more complicated ways with higher vocabulary.
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They re trying to obscure it.
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Same with scholars, when they have research that is later shown to be fraudulent, are more likely to make the writing hard to read in those sections.
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Who knows why?
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But I think it s partly because they themselves are trying to be hiding in their language.
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SPEAKER_01
Well, Todd, thank you for that.
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Another area I wanted to cover was multitasking.
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And for me, multitasking was something that I was taught to do when I was at the Naval Academy because we had so much going on that you really couldn t deal with everything that was happening unless you were doing multiple things at the same time.
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However,
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What I ve learned and what research has now shown is that this is not really a great solution to the problem of having too much to do and too little time and attention to do it.
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SPEAKER_01
You introduced something in the book called the Stroop Effect.
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How does that apply to multitasking?
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The Stroop Effect, and your listeners can look this up, it s very cool.
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It basically shows that when you re trying to do two things at the same time, you slow down a lot.
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versus if you re doing two things that require different actions versus two things that go in the same direction.
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Really hard to describe it in words.
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You should look it up.
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It s incredible.
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But what it does is it illustrates that it s really mentally difficult to do two things at one time.
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So difficult that it is like noticeably, almost comically slowing in how fast we re capable of doing anything.
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I think that has a couple of really nice
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not nice, but I guess not nice consequences for reading, which is as readers, we think we can do multiple things at once.
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It s not surprising that our minds can t do multiple things at the exact same time.
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What s surprising is that we don t really internalize that.
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We still think, yes, other people can t multitask, but I can.
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It turns out very few people can do it without paying a
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our readers do that.
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They are distracted.
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They are thinking about the next thing as they re doing whatever we re asking them to do.
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And so as writers, just being aware of the experience of readers, they re cognitively very distracted and going as fast as they possibly can because they want to move on to the next thing.
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And so what the Shroop effect helps us illustrate is how
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Part of it is through multiple things at once.
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And people try to do it.
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And so what that leads to is lower quality reading, pulling out less of the key information than we think that they are going to be pulling out.
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And what that means for writers is even more profound mandate or necessity that we write in ways that reflect the reality that our readers are not paying as much attention as we want them to and probably expect them to.
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SPEAKER_01
And Todd, I m not sure if you re familiar with Gloria Mark, but if there s a listener out there, she s a professor, I think, at University of California, Irvine, and wrote a great book over the past year called Attention Span.
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And if you wanted to learn a lot more about this and her 25, 30 years of science studying it, it s a great book that outlays much more on multitasking, why it s such a bad thing for us to do.
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I m going to go back to a person I brought up before, and that s Adam Grant.
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And in the book,
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You have a great quote of his, which is, turning thoughts into words sharpens reasoning.
4
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What s fuzzy in your head is clear on page.
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SPEAKER_01
And using this logic, how can a listener use the writing process itself to help them gain better mental clarity?
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SPEAKER_00
Great question.
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I love that book, Attention Span.
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I also recommend it.
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I think that we often merge by accident.
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without awareness, the clarifying outcome of writing with the goal of communicating to someone else.
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SPEAKER_00
So often when we start writing, we think we know what we re writing about.
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Literally, it could even be a text message, as you re writing, but it could also be an email.
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I work with people who write reports, like often people with the CIA who write intelligence assessments.
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SPEAKER_00
And we think we know what we re writing.
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SPEAKER_00
And as we write, it becomes clearer exactly what we re trying to accomplish.
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SPEAKER_00
And it ends with a conclusion.
4
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That s the real key point.
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SPEAKER_00
And we end with it.
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Writing can be fantastic for clarifying the way we think, helping us understand our own goals and what we want to accomplish with our writing.
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But I think that
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Sometimes we confuse that for the final stage of writing.
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That is the end.
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It is not the end.
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That actually helps you realize what the point of that writing activity was in the first place, which we then should rewrite everything through the lens of now that I know what my goal was.
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SPEAKER_00
I think just to be clear, there are two different functions writing often has, and they sometimes get confused.
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One is writing can help us clarify our own thinking.
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And that s what Adam is talking about in that quote.
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That s what anyone who has journaled or anyone who has tried to write something and then at the end realized that they want to say something totally different.
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It can help us clarify our thinking.
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In the process, we stack lots of sentences on top of others and we end with clarity.
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But if our goal then is the second part, which is I want to convey from my head, my idea to your head, my idea, John,
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Then I got to start over and be like, okay, now from the perspective of how do I get through to you?
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Writing has this different function now that I m clear on my own goal.
4
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And so I think that is kind of a subtle point.
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Writing can do two things.
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It can clarify your own thinking.
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It can also be the magic of getting one idea in my head into your head, but they re different things and the product needs to look different.
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I know for me, it has been one of the most useful tools that I ve had in my career is taking complex thoughts or ideas or strategies that are in my head and just writing them out.
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Because as you do it, you find that some things you re thinking are inaccurate and other things you latch onto and it s, wow, that s a brilliant idea.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then you end up carving it out.
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I think much better when I write than when I just.
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think about it or see it on a screen.
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SPEAKER_01
So I completely agree with what you guys bring up there.
4
SPEAKER_01
In the book, you lay out six principles of effective writing.
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SPEAKER_01
You ve talked about one of them several times, which is less is more.
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SPEAKER_01
I wanted to go through just a couple more of them so the readers can get a taste of some of these things.
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Your second principle is to make reading easy.
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What can we learn from the TV show Seinfeld about two impediments to effective writing?
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Make reading easy means make it easy for the reader to pull out our ideas with minimal effort.
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mental effort.
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And there s this nice example that we talk about in the book.
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Seinfeld is given terms and conditions, some kind of rental contract when he s renting a car.
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He says it s 500 pages and it s 500 pages of basically unreadable text.
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SPEAKER_00
And the person at the rental desk acted as if it was reasonable to assume that Seinfeld would have read it.
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And hilarity ensues.
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But the principle is if we want our readers to read and understand what we are saying,
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That means use short words that people are familiar with, common words.
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Words is better than verbiage.
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SPEAKER_00
Wordy is better than loquacious.
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SPEAKER_00
So use common, short words relative to uncommon, longer words.
4
SPEAKER_00
But there s also another part, which I just didn t know about.
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SPEAKER_00
It was one of the real discoveries of writing this that was a pleasure for me.
4
SPEAKER_00
I had no idea there s all this work on eye tracking.
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where they watch people read and they watch their eyes go word to word to word and then period and then move on to the next one.
4
SPEAKER_00
And there s this thing called the period pause effect.
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Watch yourself read.
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SPEAKER_00
There are two things that just happen implicitly without even paying attention.
4
SPEAKER_00
One, at the end of a sentence, you stop and you just wait there while your mind makes sense of, did I get the idea of that sentence?
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SPEAKER_00
And when the sentences are longer, that idea is harder to get.
4
SPEAKER_00
And often it requires doing the second thing, which is regressing, going backwards and rereading to make sure that you understand what everything was about.
4
SPEAKER_00
The longer the sentence, the more complex the sentence, the longer we have to wait and the more often we have to go backwards to reread.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that not only just adds time to reading, it also makes people more likely to give up and just be like, I ll read it later.
4
SPEAKER_00
I ll deal with this later.
4
SPEAKER_00
It makes it harder and more unpleasant.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so what I love about that, the eye tracking is just like, it shows it vividly, boom, boom, word, period.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then just stop and then move on.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so the goal is to write sentences that people can read quickly without going backwards and without long pauses.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think that s a great principle.
4
SPEAKER_01
The next one I wanted to talk about, which was really interesting for me, as much writing as I do to learn more about is the fourth principle, which is use enough formatting, but no more.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I really liked the analogy that you used in the book that formatting is like spice when it comes to cooking because I love to cook and every cook knows that you ve got to use the right amount of spice because too much can destroy what you re doing and not enough can impact the taste quality.
4
SPEAKER_01
Using that analogy of spice and cooking, what are the main purposes of formatting and rules of effective formatting?
4
SPEAKER_00
Formatting can be an incredibly powerful complement to our writing, like spice, but too much of it is worse than none at all.
4
SPEAKER_00
Here are a couple of facts about formatting.
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SPEAKER_00
Readers interpret bold, underline, and highlight, bold, underline, and highlight, as the writer saying, this is the most important content for you to pull out of our message.
4
SPEAKER_00
So readers interpret that as this is the most important key information.
4
SPEAKER_00
If you add to that the reality that they re trying to move on as quickly as possible, then you can predict what happens.
4
SPEAKER_00
When you bold, underline, or highlight something, people read that, and they re way less likely to read anything else.
4
SPEAKER_00
So in that scenario, if you bold, highlight, underline the wrong thing,
4
SPEAKER_00
you decrease people s likelihood of reading the rest of it.
4
SPEAKER_00
So you need to be really careful in how you use it, but it s a really powerful tool.
4
SPEAKER_00
You can make sure they pull out the key info, but you re gonna decrease the likelihood they pull anything else out.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then other things we ve seen is that when you bold, underline, highlight, or all the other kinds of formatting you can do, and you do lots of it, it confuses readers.
4
SPEAKER_00
It puts you in danger of decreasing the likelihood that they pull any of the key info out.
4
SPEAKER_00
Because once it becomes a Picasso painting of formatting, readers get confused.
4
SPEAKER_00
They re not sure what the formatting means.
4
SPEAKER_00
And they ll often interpret it differently than you intend for it to be.
4
SPEAKER_00
You change the font color, you have bullets also, and italics in all caps.
4
SPEAKER_00
Readers have no idea what you re trying to do with it.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it will end up leading some to think that a piece of information is the most important when you don t mean that, and vice versa.
4
SPEAKER_00
The thing that you think is important, they don t think is the most important.
4
SPEAKER_00
So we say use enough formatting, as much formatting as you need, but no more.
4
SPEAKER_00
And the idea is you really want to limit it because it s a really powerful tool, but it can also confuse and derail whatever your writing goal is.
4
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
4
SPEAKER_01
Thank you, Todd.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the last question I had for you was how while writing this book, did you
5
SPEAKER_01
Jessica apply some of the psychological insights to yourselves?
5
SPEAKER_01
And then what would be some of the biggest learnings that you would want a reader to get from the book?
5
SPEAKER_02
We wanted to make the book, at first, a extremely almost comically concise document, a five page summary in bullet points.
5
SPEAKER_02
And our editor was like, look, people expect a book to look like a book.
5
SPEAKER_02
And they are buying and reading a book, expecting to read something that reads like a book.
5
SPEAKER_02
We were initially just completely overlooked.
5
SPEAKER_02
People have expectations for how something is going to read.
5
SPEAKER_02
And we as writers need to meet those expectations.
5
SPEAKER_02
And a book is supposed to read like a book.
5
SPEAKER_02
That said, we can still make it easy to navigate.
5
SPEAKER_02
We can have clear headings.
5
SPEAKER_02
common norms.
5
SPEAKER_02
So each principle has five or so sub-principles, and the formatting is really clear if you skim through the book to pull those out and dive in where you are most interested.
5
SPEAKER_02
You can also write easy sentences that are easy for people to read and enjoyable for people to read.
5
SPEAKER_02
So within the structure, what we write has to look like what the reader expects.
5
SPEAKER_02
But then we can make it easier for them.
5
SPEAKER_02
And so I think that the way we applied it was we made it easy for skimmers to get where they wanted to in the book with good structure, clear headings, and consistency throughout the book.
5
SPEAKER_02
That s how the writing went.
5
SPEAKER_02
The TLDR version, the too-long-didn t-read version of the book, if anybody really wants it, it s make it easy for the reader because it s more effective, it s kinder, it s more inclusive.
5
SPEAKER_02
So when we are writing, right, to clarify our thinking, right, to convey all the key info we want, and then have a final round of edit where we re like, how do I make it easier for the reader?
5
SPEAKER_02
Because the easier we make it, the more effective we ll be and the kinder it ll be.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I ll end on this.
5
SPEAKER_01
I love the endorsement that my friend Max Bazerman gave you.
5
SPEAKER_01
He said it s worth every bit of $28 and the hours that will take you to read the book and apply it to your life.
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Something like that.
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Typical Max.
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I hope, I think it s shorter than that.
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It s still the length of a book, but it should probably take five to seven hours, hopefully.
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No, it was only 200 pages.
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I was joking about what he said, but it was typical Max humor.
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Well, Todd, thank you so much for joining us today.
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It was really an honor to have you and congratulations on putting this amazing work into the world.
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John, thank you for having me.
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I m a big fan and really grateful that I get to share this with your listeners.
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I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Dr. Todd Rogers, and I wanted to thank Todd, Katie Milkman, and Penguin Random House for the honor and privilege of having them appear today on the show.
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Links to all things Todd will be in the show notes.
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Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show.
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All proceeds go to supporting the show.
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Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one community place at passionstruck.com slash deals.
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Videos are on YouTube, both at John or Miles and Passionstruck Clips.
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As I mentioned, we are on the Brushwood Media Network where you can listen to my syndicated radio show Monday and Friday from 5 to 6 p.m.
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Eastern Time.
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My new book, Passionstruck, which is all about the science
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of Living Intentionally is now ready for pre-order on Amazon.
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Links will be in the show notes.
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You can find me at Jon R. Miles on all the social platforms, or you can go to either PassionStruck.com or JonRMiles.com to sign up for my weekly newsletter.
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You re about to hear a preview of the PassionStruck podcast interview that I did with Eduardo Burcino, and he s here to share some groundbreaking insights on how to escape the performance paradox
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and embrace intentional living for higher-level results.
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Eduardo coined the term chronic performance trap to describe the counterintuitive phenomenon that often occurs when we relentlessly work harder only to find ourselves exhausted and unfulfilled.
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But fear not.
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Eduardo brings a wealth of strategies from world-renowned individuals and companies that have cracked the code to peak performance while maintaining a sense of purpose and vitality.
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I think a lot of us get myopic vision around what we re doing right now, what we want to accomplish, our to-do list, or our current goals.
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It s good to be goal-oriented, but if we re so focused on that, we lose sight of things that might be in the periphery that might help us make greater progress toward our goals, but also opportunities that we might not have never even
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thought about like for me becoming a public speaker or later writing a book was something that I wasn t planning to do.
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First is kind of stepping back and reflecting regularly.
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Remember what are my highest goals are and think about what are some ways that I could pursue those highest level goals that how can I get better at that.
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So rather than get lost in like mid-level goals or low-level tasks, thinking about again every once in a while what do I care most about and how can I get better at that.
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The fee for this show is that you share it with family or friends when you find something useful or interesting.
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If you know somebody who s really into the art of writing or needs better writing habits, then definitely share today s episode with them because the greatest compliment that you can give the show is to share it with those that you care about.
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In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen.
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Now go out there and become Passion Strike.