Breaking the long-form habit

TikTok and Twitter have shown us how people naturally consume information today: fast, focused, and easy to digest.

Work communication looks nothing like that.

Despite how we live online, we still expect teams to read long documents, process dense emails, and sift through sprawling reports just to find what matters. The gap between how people consume information and how work delivers it keeps growing.

The attention mismatch at work

The numbers make the problem obvious:

• Average adult attention span: 8 seconds
• Average work email length: 434 words
• Average time to read a work document: 11 minutes

When communication formats ignore how attention actually works, important information doesn’t just slow down. It gets missed, misunderstood, or ignored entirely.

This isn’t a discipline problem. It’s a design problem.

Long documents aren’t the same as clarity

Length is often mistaken for completeness. In reality, long documents push cognitive effort onto the reader, forcing them to extract what matters on their own.

That works poorly in modern teams where:

• people read selectively
• responsibilities are specialized
• time is fragmented across meetings and tools

When everything is bundled together, nothing stands out.

A different way to communicate at work

There’s an alternative that aligns better with how people already think and work.

Instead of producing large reports all at once, teams can create bite-sized pieces of information continuously. Tasks become smaller and more focused. Reading becomes intentional. People only consume what is relevant to their role and decision.

This shift brings tangible benefits:

• higher retention
• better engagement
• faster understanding
• smoother execution

Not because people try harder, but because the format works with their attention instead of fighting it.

Designing communication for real brains

At illumi, we’re exploring how to make work communication more modular, lightweight, and reusable. The goal isn’t to oversimplify work, but to remove unnecessary friction from how information is captured and shared.

When knowledge is broken into clear, structured pieces, teams spend less time re-reading, re-explaining, and reconstructing context. Work moves forward instead of piling up.

TL;DR

• Modern attention favors fast, focused information, but work communication remains slow and heavy.
• Long documents increase the risk of missed or misunderstood information.
• Bite-sized, continuous documentation improves clarity and efficiency.
• Communication works better when it’s designed around how people actually process information.

What do you think? How would bite-sized content change the way your team works?

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