It was remiss of me not to point to Tom Steinberg’s excellent piece on ‘one pagers’.
Barely a day goes by when i am not asked to produce one of these (often by someone who has already requested, and received, a paper on the same subject previously…).
Whilst I enjoy the discipline of containing an idea or proposition to one side of paper, the request to ‘do me a one pager’ invariably makes me feel quite ill – I generally feel like replying with a two worder.
A one pager? http://tinyurl.com/4j2y9
I love Tom’s post, it’s utterly convincing, and yes there are better tools than paper and Word. But brevity is such a rare thing I dont’ think I’ll be chastising anyone who asks for it!
But if one more person says “disbenefits” to me this week I’m going to burn the building to the ground.
@ Neil – yikes, that is the worst word I have heard!
I used to work for a boss that always insisted on one page reports. I became quite good at writing them – but by a strange coincidence, the more complicated the subject got, the smaller the font became…
@Paul – yeah, that and the margins begin to shrink….