I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one instead

- Mark Twain

It’s easy to vomit words onto a page, blurting out whatever comes to mind.

But it’s tiring to tun those words into cohesive sentences for other people to read.

We’ve all experienced it before; confusing emails, long text messages, useless lectures, and prolonged conversations with friends routinely waste our time.

We spend an unnecessary amount energy trying to decipher what the original objective of the conversation was in the first place.

Intentionality and conciseness are required to share your ideas optimally.

The only problem with this approach is that it requires thinking and planning, two things that most people don’t have the time or bother to do.

Whether it’s sending an email to your coworkers, or giving a presentation at a TED talk, we can all exercise a bit of intentionality in our writing and speaking.