One Minute Pause No 11

There’s something magical about the number 3.

Let me explain.

We live in an over communicated society.

There’s advertising everywhere.

Sometimes I wander from the bedroom to the bathroom half-expecting an advertiser to have bought the floor space. (”Have you thought about new around-the-rim Domestos?).

In response to this over-communication, there’s a part of our mind that works to block out unwanted messages.

That’s the bit of your brain that turns down the radio ads in the car, ignores the banner ads on the websites you surf and shuts out the messages plastered to the escalator at Marks and Spencer.

Which is good.

And bad.

The downside is that when you are trying to present to a group at work, if you have too many messages your audience could go into automatic shutdown as well.

So, to the title of today’s OMP.

The power of 3.

There’s been plenty of research conducted into 3 as being the exact number of things people can remember easily. If you give people four, or five things to remember, they might forget one or two.

But 3 is key.

We all remember 3 things.

So, next time you are rattling off a list of items to people, keep in mind that they will probably do one of three things:

1. Remember only 3 things that you say out of a list of many.

2. Forget the lot. It all goes into the “too-hard” basket.

3. Try to get you to reiterate what you are saying so they can prioritise your list into their own group of 3.

The best thing you can do is to remember the power of 3, and use it to your advantage.

Trim the list. Sort into groups. Leave some stuff for next time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 26th, 2005 at 10:57 am and is filed under One Minute Pause. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.