Heard my boss say 'nobody reads past the first sentence' in a meeting about our reports

He said it right after I spent two hours writing a detailed analysis for a client. Now I'm wondering if I should just write bullet points and skip all the explanation. Has anyone else noticed if people actually read the extra stuff you write or is it all just noise?

2 comments

2 Comments

kaip1112d ago

Ha, your boss is probably right but that doesn't make it sting less. I spent three days once putting together this huge market breakdown with graphs and projections. My manager skimmed it for maybe 30 seconds and asked me a question I literally answered in the second paragraph. Now I just front-load everything important in the first few lines and treat the rest like a backup document nobody will ever touch. Bullet points are safer, people scan those way more than paragraphs. Still stings when you put real work into the deeper stuff though.

the_alice12d ago

Oh man, @kaip11, you just described my entire career in one post... I once wrote a 10 page report on customer trends, color coded it and everything, and my boss just asked if I'd "checked the weather for the weekend." Now I literally put the conclusion in the subject line and call it a day. Bullet points are the only way to survive in corporate land, but it still hurts when you spent hours making pretty graphs nobody scrolls past. You'd think they'd at least pretend to look...