Managing the twitter crowd

This very interesting article on Gantthead.com talks about how to manage the short attention spans of what I like to call the "Twitter" crowd. Twitter.com is a popular social networking site that allows people to send quick text messages to people either by web or SMS messaging, IM, etc. In other words, twits sent by Twits.

As the article points out:

The articles we read tend to be shorter, the demands on our time greater and the digital content we are interested in is packaged, targeted and delivered to us in quickly consumable and easily digestible packets.

What does this mean to the manager today? With so much of our everyday lives tailored to the “I-want-what-I-want-when-I-want-it” mentality, we need to change our management approaches slightly to accommodate the culture-induced inattentiveness of our team members.

I like the articles advocation of using the "two-minute drill" metaphor from football, where your forced into making quick decisions which means having the quarter back huddle very quickly (and sometimes not at all) and dispensing the plays out quickly and succinctly.

In my profession, the project manager would be the quarter back and as the article states:

As an antidote to on-demand attention spans, the two-minute drill technique can be used with stunning results by project managers and managers alike.

By crafting a focused, targeted and easily digestible plan, you are forcing yourself to edit out the fluff and become succinct. By limiting yourself to what can be communicated in two minutes, you are distilling your message to its salient points and removing the verbose filler that we all sometimes let creep in. You may love to hear yourself talk, but not everyone else does. The longer your talk, the more diluted your message becomes--and with that dilution goes its impact. Lost in a sea of disjointed ramblings is the point that was groping to be made.

Though I prefer speakers to dive into the details of particular topic especially if it interests me or if it is important, I have to confess to pontificating on topics that I happen to be leading a meeting on or conducting a training sessions on. But not everyone wants this level of detail, nor have similar interests, and given the short and ever shortening attention spans of people these days, I'll have to be mindful of adopting a more focused, sharp and succinct delivery of communications.

On the one hand, this is good since it keeps the topic focused and saves time, but on the other, there is the risk of glossing over important details and really, what time is being saved? Typically it is time that these Twitters waste surfing the web, talking on the phone and text messaging each other.

That's what scares me about this generation and having to manage them.