Just because a document is comprehensive doesn’t mean it actually says anything.

It’s funny how often 1-page documents can tell you everything you need to know about a topic while 100-page whitepapers barely address the meat of an issue at all. Many people feel like most readers judge a document’s comprehensiveness by its weight and length. Some will even give active support to an idea simply because it is long.

I have a few rules of thumb for documents. For PowerPoint presentations:

• For sales: No more than 1 slide for every 2 minutes. More than that and all that can possibly happen is being presented at.
• For decision making: No more than 1 executive summary slide for every 2 to 5 minutes with as many appendices slides as needed.
• For case studies/general information: No more than 1 slide per minute.

For Word documents, things get a bit trickier as they tend to be meant to address topics in greater detail anyway. My biggest rule of thumb is around proposals:

• No more than 1 page for every 2 weeks worth of work (based on calendar days).

It is surprisingly easy to make documents longer, especially those built over a long period of time with a large participating group. Editing down to make the language both precise and concise is a wickedly difficult task.

Brevity is the key to successfully selling an idea. There’s a reason that elevator pitches are important – if you can’t summarize your idea down into less than a minute’s worth of speech then you can’t understand the value of your idea. TV commercials are typically 30 seconds for the same reason – people don’t give a lot of attention to sales pitches.