On your website or in your offline communications, it will always be important to keep your communications simple, clear and direct – and ensure that your readers get what they came for in as little time as possible.

Why? There are all kinds of statistics and studies about the average attention span.

It’s shrinking. That’s important to you when you are looking to get a message across.

According to the attention span study published in early 2014; conducted by National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, the 2013 average human attention span is now 8 seconds. In 2000, it averaged 12 seconds. And just for fun, the current average attention span of a goldfish is 9 seconds.

On the web, a recent U.K. Study found that the average person browsing the web switches between devices used to do so an average of 21 times an hour. When you are writing or designing for the web, take care to include key information front, and know where you want your visitors to next. Studies have shown that 32% of consumers will start abandoning slow sites (and slow searches) between one and five seconds. On a average web page with 593 words of text (and that’s not that much), visitors will likely read only about 28% of the words you have displayed.

Finally, if you use video content on the web, know that while images and video have tremendous power to tell a story, your script will need to be short. Viewers of videos on the web will on average watch for only 2.7 minutes before they tap out. And that statistic was gathered in studies that pre-dated the wide use and acceptance of Vine.  Vine videos are a maximum of 6 seconds. So, if you are putting the expense and time into taping a video that communicates your mission or service, keep it short.

This is great perspective to keep strongly in mind (post it on your office wall!) when you are designing or writing a web page. But it pays to realize that even offline, the impact of our online habit and behavior is impacting our collective patience. If you are not editing yourself, do that. Do it multiple times, and then ask someone else to read what you’ve written.

There’s no doubt that briefer communications will pay off in a better chance to capture your audience’s attention. But in addition, it is an expression of your respect for their time.