Scary, but true: Because of the inefficient use of electronic media of all kinds over the past two decades, the world will likely face a pixel shortage in the near future.
What, you may be asking, can be done to avoid this minor catastrophe? Consider yourself called to action – Be more effective in your use of precious pixels by reducing the length of website content, emails, blogs, and even try to shave a character or two off Tweets (Who really needs all 140 characters to make a point?).
How might this be done? According to COPS (Citizens for Optimizing Pixel Strategies), the single habit change that will immediately reduce wasted pixels is…editing. According to this group’s estimations, 25% of all electronic communication would be found redundant, incomprehensible or otherwise useless if only people would take just one minute for every 10 minutes of writing time to read their own material. A second minute to make edits could alter the history of the world… or at least help people keep their jobs.
Additional benefits: clear and concise writing is more likely to be read and understood, and therefore potentially more persuasive…
(COPS members also express concern over the potential overuse of passive verbs, but found it hard to come up with a cute acronym using P and V.)
In my own effort to preempt the impending pixel shortage, this month’s note will be closer to 250 words than 400.