沟通要多动脑少动嘴

    这就像软件中的“功能蔓延”，我们可以称之为罗列蔓延。出发点可能是好的，但效果不佳。越是对“罗列蔓延”敏感，我就越担心我们的讨论可能是鸡同鸭讲，不断往上堆积，导致初衷迷失，浪费时间。

    我问过《减法法则》（The Laws of Subtraction）的作者马修·梅，把很多想法硬塞进一个句子的冲动来自哪里？他将此归咎于缺乏自制。“如果没有自制，本能就会占据主导，”他说。“我们的固有本能就是添加，掌握的东西越多，我们就越感到安全。”

    竞争性工作环境下，塞入过多沟通内容往往比遗漏更安全。但梅说，这种自我保护的本能可能弊大于利。

    “具有讽刺意味的是，世界的注意广度正在收窄。我们要想继续有人听，就必须得花点功夫。写微博和短消息或许能让我们成为更好的编辑。我们想通过这样的自制，形成中长期模式。”

    如果您担心自己可能已感染上了“罗列病”，不想进一步陷入毫无逻辑的境地，一种办法就是检查你的名词:动词比率。（像上述这样的10:4比例，表明废话过多，行动不足。）

    梅建议不妨预设一个限值，即便这在一些同行看来可能有些草率。“我通常以3为限。我想这是大多数人能够做到的。当然，最理想的情况是1。”

    另外，建立一套固定的修改流程也有帮助。梅表示，他会在段落中快速浏览每次出现的“和”，而且尝试把“和”后面的部分删除。但他也说“不一定每次都能做到”。热和闷改成热，后面是句号。

    决定哪些略过不提并不是件容易的事。正如贝佐斯所言，这需要想清楚。它意味着需要孤立和整体地评估各个要素的重要性。

    博主克里斯多夫·莱福写道，它还意味着感受一下稿件的份量。是的，就是字面意思的份量，他还记得到好莱坞工作时见到的一个奇特传统。“制片人或审稿人拿到剧本的第一件事就是本能地拿起来‘掂量掂量’。真的就是掂量一下。”

    太重了？莱福写到：“这样的剧本很少有人仔细阅读，可能连看都不会看。”

    当然也会有例外。但如果你可以将一个项目从列表中划掉，或许你的确应该这么做。

    Like feature creep in software, what we might call list creep is insidious. The intentions may be good but the effect underwhelms. The more sensitive I become to list creep, the more I worry we waste time talking past each other, perpetually tacking on one more "thing" and only making our intended meaning blurrier.

    I asked Matthew E. May, author of The Laws of Subtraction, where the compulsion to stuff multiple ideas into a single sentence comes from. He faulted a lack of self-control. "Without the discipline, instinct takes over," he says. "Our hardwired instinct is to add, as slack resources make us feel safe."

    In competitive work situations, overstuffing your communications often seems like a safer bet than running the risk of leaving something out. But that instinct for self-preservation may be doing more harm than good, says May.

    "The ironic thing is that the world's attention span is shrinking, so we're going to have to do the work if we want to stay relevant. Twitter and texting may be inadvertently making us better editors. We just need to apply that discipline to our longer formats."

    If you're worried that you've succumbed to list creep, one way to halt your slide into incoherence is to check your memos for noun: verb ratio. (A 10:4 ratio like the one above implies a lot of conversation, not enough action.)

    May recommends setting predetermined limits, even if they strike some colleagues as arbitrary. "I try to follow the rule of three. I think that's the most people can retain. The ideal is one, of course."

    A routine revision process also helps. May says he scans his paragraphs for every instance of the word "and." Then he tries -- "not always successfully," he adds -- to eliminate what follows each "and." Hot and sticky becomes hot, period.

    Deciding what can go unmentioned is hard work. It involves, as Bezos suggested, clear thinking. It means assessing the importance of each element in isolation and as part of the whole.

    It also means getting a sense for how heavy -- literally -- a document should be, writes blogger Christopher Rife, who recalls witnessing a strange ritual upon arriving for work in Hollywood. "The first thing a producer or reader would do with a script, instinctively, was to pick it up and 'weigh' it. Literally weigh it."

    Too heavy? "It ha[d] little chance of being read with care or read at all," Rife writes.

    There will always be exceptions. But it's tempting to recommend that if you can cross it off your list, you probably should.