Alastair WallaceCEO. Lead Consultant. Trainer. Coach, Brainfood Ltd · Leadership & Management Training for Busy Managers. Helping senior leaders stop handholding | Brain-friendly, diary-friendly | Save 5+ hours a week | 23,500 managers trained | 200% ROI guaranteed. TED

Be UNFORGETTABLE: How leaders give MEMORABLE INSTRUCTIONS

19 Nov 2023 · 2 min

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1:39

In this concise coaching talk, Alastair Wallace highlights the cognitive constraints that hinder effective communication: adults typically have a 20‑minute attention span, can hold roughly seven items in short‑term memory, and generate about 70,000 thoughts daily. He explains the primacy‑recency effect—people remember the first and last pieces of information best—and shows how leaders can exploit this bias. Wallace offers concrete, low‑effort tactics: start meetings with a clear purpose, end them with explicit actions, deadlines, and a brief recap; write email subject lines that are meaningful and succinct; and close emails with a summary of the most important points. By deliberately structuring the beginning and ending of communications, leaders can make instructions far more memorable and reduce misunderstandings, wasted effort, and confusion.

Chapters

Have you got a good memory? Because I don't. Most adults have an attention span of about 20 minutes. Short-term memory can hold about 7 pieces of information at the same time, and we have on average 70,000 thoughts every day. I'm exhausted just thinking about that. So, how do we get our team members and colleagues to remember important things when we speak or write to them. Forgetting and misunderstanding tasks creates lots of extra work, confusion, and wasted time. When your brain encodes a memory, it's usually easier to recall the first and the last piece of information about that experience. We call it the primacy-recency effect. For example, it's easier to remember what you did on the first and the last day of your holiday. The beginning and the end of that film you love. The first romantic date and the final showdown, end of a relationship. Create deliberate primacy and recency with your meetings and your emails every time. Start with a clear meeting purpose and finish with specific actions and deadlines. Meaningful and succinct email subject title. Not re, yesterday. And sign off with a summary of the most important points. Such an easy hack and so effective. Give it a try today. In fact, I'll do a recency for you now. Start with a bang, finish with a bang.