Alan O'Shanghnessy

Brevity as kindness in the age of cognitive overload

I’ve been noticing something in meetings lately.

Not in the content. In the body language.

People shifting in their chairs two minutes in. Eyes drifting toward laptops before the presenter finishes the second slide. That particular kind of nodding that means “I’ve already decided this isn’t worth my full attention.” Someone unmutes to ask a question that was answered thirty seconds ago because they were reading Teams. I feel it too, sitting there, not just watching it happen to other people. The same pull toward the inbox, the same internal clock counting down to the next thing.

It’s not rudeness. I don’t think it is, anyway.

It’s something else. Something heavier.

The Room Has Changed

I used to think impatience in meetings was a personality thing. Some people are just wired to want things faster. But over the past year or so, I’ve started to see it everywhere. Not just in meetings. In events. In conversations with colleagues. In the speed at which people scan emails and decide whether something is worth reading past the subject line.

And I think the reason is simpler and more uncomfortable than we’d like to admit.

People are full.

Mentally, cognitively, emotionally full. And they were already full before they walked into your meeting.

Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index put a number on it: the average knowledge worker is interrupted every two minutes. That’s roughly 275 interruptions per day. They receive 117 emails and 153 Teams messages daily. Nearly half of employees describe their work as “chaotic and fragmented.” Sixty-eight percent say they struggle with work pace and volume.

Those aren’t abstract statistics. That’s what’s sitting across the table from you when you start talking.

Where Patience Went

There’s research from Joseph McCormack’s book Brief that I keep coming back to. He writes about how the average attention span dropped from 12 seconds to 8. How workers get interrupted every 8 minutes and it takes 25 minutes to return to the original task.

That book came out over a decade ago.

The numbers have gotten worse.

What struck me most was this line: “You work around people who are mentally stretched. When you are succinct, you instantly make their life easier. And they remember and are grateful to you for that.”

I read that and thought about every 45-minute presentation I’ve sat through where the point could have been made in five minutes. Every email that took four paragraphs to say “yes.” Every meeting that existed because someone didn’t want to make a decision alone.

And then I thought about how many times I’ve done the same thing to others.

The AI Acceleration

Here’s where it gets harder.

AI hasn’t just changed the tools we use. It’s changed what people expect from each other.

McKinsey’s research shows that ventures launched in the AI era are reaching $10 million in revenue in 31 months, down from 38. Small teams are expected to deliver what large organisations used to. And 92 percent of executives plan to increase AI spending, which means the expectation of faster, more, better isn’t slowing down. It’s accelerating.

I see this playing out in real conversations. A colleague finishes a project in three days that would have taken two weeks a year ago, and the response isn’t “great, take a breath.” The response is “what’s next?” The time AI saves gets immediately refilled with more work. Not reclaimed for thinking. Not used for rest. Just absorbed into higher throughput expectations.

Note: Not that faster means more value for the business. But that is subject for another blog.

And here’s the part that doesn’t get discussed enough: it’s not just the doing that’s exhausting. It’s the monitoring.

BCG published a study earlier this year on something they call “AI brain fry.” They surveyed nearly 1,500 workers and found that 14 percent of AI users experience cognitive overload not from using AI, but from overseeing it. Checking its outputs. Correcting its mistakes. Evaluating whether what it produced is actually good enough to send.

Those workers reported 14 percent more mental effort, 12 percent more fatigue, and 19 percent more information overload. Decision fatigue went up 33 percent. Major errors increased by 39 percent.

We built tools that think faster than us and then asked humans to keep up with the verification.

That’s a strange kind of progress.

The Weight You Can’t See

So when someone seems impatient in your meeting, or skims your document, or checks out mid-conversation, I don’t think the right response is frustration.

I think the right response is recognition.

That person has probably already processed dozens of inputs before they got to you. They’ve monitored AI outputs, context-switched between projects, and made micro-decisions all morning. Their attention isn’t a renewable resource that resets between calendar blocks. It’s a muscle that’s been lifting all day.

McCormack was right about something important: the road to brevity requires hard work and lots of time. Doing all the digging and analysis on your own time saves the members of your audience from doing the labour themselves.

Being brief isn’t about being superficial. It’s about having done the deep work already so that what you present is the essence, not the journey.

Brevity as Kindness

I’ve started thinking about brevity differently.

Not as a communication technique. Not as a presentation skill. As a form of respect.

When you show up to a meeting and get to the point in three minutes instead of fifteen, you’re not cutting corners. You’re acknowledging that the person across from you is carrying a cognitive load you can’t see. You’re choosing not to add to it unnecessarily.

When you write a short email instead of a long one, you’re not being terse. You’re doing the work of distilling so they don’t have to.

When you say “here’s what I need and why” instead of building context for ten minutes before arriving at your ask, you’re being generous with someone else’s most scarce resource.

Their attention.

In a world where the average worker’s focused session has shrunk to 13 minutes, where 50 to 60 interruptions happen daily, where AI has quietly raised the bar on what “fast enough” means, choosing to be brief is one of the kindest things you can do for the people around you.

What this all means?

Everyone around us is mentally stretched (and the data says they are, and I believe the data because I can see it in every room I walk into), then the least we can do is not make it worse.

Maybe the most valuable communication skill right now isn’t presenting, or storytelling, or persuasion.

Maybe it’s kindness.

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