In these two months of Sabbatical, I have done a lot of different reaching out to others. In brainstorming meetings, in reading several books and listening to podcasts, in writing many blog posts and sharing them via email or social networks.

In this post, I explore the different ways we use to reach others, from text messages to conversations, books or movies. I classify each of these ways into their effort, time to consume or level of complexity they can describe.

After making all this analysis and testing the readability of my blog, I have concluded that blogging is for sure not the best way to reach out to others and, if I would anyway continue, I need to make my writing style more reachable.

Different Ways. Different Dynamics.

I have gathered data on the web to characterize the multiple ways we can communicate and reach others. The goal was to understand numerical characteristics, like the fact that a Blog post takes 5x more time than a meeting to prepare or that a Hollywood movie takes 10.000x working hours to produce than a book.

On the other side, I also classified each way of reaching others in non-numerical characteristics, almost all related to the value of the reaching, like the fact that a PodCast can explain a lot of complexity to a huge audience but the feedback, or discussion, with that audience, is decoupled in time from its creation. Another example is a good conversation, which can host a lot of complexity and the feedback of the audience is live, but the audience can’t be wider than a few persons.

The table below sums up all the data and classifications. As you can see, I included some exotic lines like Einstein Relativity Paper to spice up the exercise. At the bottom, there are some data aggregation examples to compare the data used to reach out to others with some other large data repositories. I did not include any references because they are too many and not 100% verified, so please take the numbers only as a though exercise.

In order to separate visually the several lines of the table, I create the chart below to show that some ways are very efficient, taking almost the same time to create as to consume, while others scale very fast to high numbers. This chart, combined with the table above drove me to these insights:

• Conversations or Meetings are an unbeaten efficient way to reach others in exploratory mode, especially if you need live feedback as I do.
• A Blog is really just average in everything. Which can be seen as bad or good, but I was not so pleased with this insight 🙂 I need to reevaluate its usefulness.
• Movies are incredibly inefficient to reach out for others, especially if it’s a blockbuster with no story…what a waste of creative time!
• Diagrams seem powerful. Although there is a considerable effort to create, the combination of low time to consume and high complexity that they can explain puts them on my radar for the next weeks!

Is this Blog an Efficient way to Reach others?

To isolate my effort on the Blog effort, I analyzed the quality of the posts in terms of readability. It looks like a text is more readable if its sentences range between 8 and 14 words and becomes difficult to follow if the sentences go above 20 words per sentence.

I used this free tool to generate writing statistics https://www.analyzemywriting.com. The data of each post is charted in the image below. The result is that more than half of my posts (probably including this one) need strong attention to be understood and not a single post is easy to read. Wow… Challenge accepted for next post 🙂

As a note for others, the available tools for writing statistics have a lot of extra and deep readability analysis. I advise anyone trying to write long texts like books or use them.

While I was searching text statistics I came across some tools to generate clouds of words based on the number of times they are repeated in a text. Here is my word cloud for all the posts on my blog made with https://www.wordclouds.com. If I take the most used words in my texts I could make a sentence like “I Like my Life with Intelligence and Time”… this is me operating like ChatGPT 🙂