The brief is a voice note

A great many of the briefs I am given arrive as a voice note. Two minutes, sometimes three, recorded in a car between two meetings.

There is nothing lazy about it. It is the fastest honest thing a busy person can do, and it carries a tone that an email would flatten out.

The problem is the shape of it.

A voice note has no scroll bar. Nobody skims it. Nobody runs an eye down it looking for the date, the way an eye finds a date in a paragraph. It plays in the order it was recorded, at the speed the sender spoke, and the listener has exactly one move available, which is to stop.

So they stop. Not out of disrespect. They stop somewhere around fifteen seconds, because a message from a senior person on a Thursday afternoon almost always opens with context, and context does not tell them whether they have to act before the weekend. They will come back to it later, they think. There are forty seconds of actual instruction sitting at minute two, and nobody ever hears them.

Two minutes of somebody's attention were given, and nothing came back across the table. The brief was sent, and received, and never delivered.

So I record mine backwards now. The one line the work has to carry goes first, in the opening seconds, before anything is explained. The deadline goes second, with a day and an hour in it. The background goes third, for whoever is still listening.

And the part I most want to say, how I feel about the last version, what I would like the team to understand about my week, does not go in at all.

That is not a brief. It is a conversation, and it deserves to be one.