Communication: Be concise...

I've found this principle applies across the board from face-to-face meetings and presentations to e-mail. People are just better at digesting information one idea at a time - the shorter the better.

Some examples:

Presentations shouldn't contain more than 2 or 3 main takeaways and will ideally come in at a little under an hour - give or take. Beyond that your audience will start to miss parts of your message. It really isn't worth it. If that's not possible, save some material for another presentation.

Slides filled with bullet points don't help you. One idea per slide for the speaker to talk to works much better. The first time I tried this I ended up with 90 slides instead of 20 but I people definitely enjoyed the pace and format more.

E-mails should focus on 1 main idea and preferably fit on my screen without scrolling. Anything else is intimidating. (I'm only using e-mail these days to give background/context for face-to-faces.)