Talk less, get more.
In 2010, a Washington university concluded that the attention span of the listener greatly declines after 30 seconds. The average individual has a limit to how much information they can digest at one time. That doesn’t mean after 30 seconds they stop hearing you. They will just have a hard time following and retaining details after that.
If you want to have an effective conversation, be as direct as you can. Don’t ramble on and on. Give the other party a chance to respond before moving on to another issue. Refrain from using technical language that may puzzle the listener. Let the 30 second rule be a guide for getting to your point, then stop and listen. It’s very easy to blame the listener and wonder why they haven’t understood you after 10 minutes. Those minutes may be the root of the problem.
Most of us have a sense of this. The fact that information overload creates confusion. You may have spoken to someone trying to make a point in the past. They went on and on with evidence for their case. In the end it seems like they presented enough facts and you were unable to address all of their points. But in reality they only created a situation of confusion using a monologue. It’s not that the points were strong. You weren’t able to address them then and there because they exploited the human attention span. Trying to recall details of their speech feels like a maze.
We all can remember a movie in which the lawyer questions a witness. A series of questions are fired and the witness doesn’t seem to have definitive answers for some or remains silent for others. This situation was created using a technique of bombardment. The goal of which is to make the witness look foolish in front of those present. If the lawyer really wanted answers, he would have made each question short and concise then stopped to listen. He would have talked less and gotten more.
