Do you have the time?
One of the weirdest things I learned during the pandemic was been the manipulation of duration for optimal engagement. Almost all of my newsletter articles were three paragraphs long. I would record songs to be released by the church’s social media that were more than three minutes but less than four. When I made musical sermon intros for online worship, they were generally somewhere between sixty and ninety seconds. There's a sweet spot somewhere between "just enough" and "too "much," but those two points can be excruciatingly close together.
Of course, that's something that we all know intuitively to one degree or another. No one is shocked to hear that Hey Jude and Bohemian Rhapsody were discouraged from being released as singles by their respective record labels. After all, both songs are well over the three-minute mark that I've spent the last sixteen months refining. When the TV show Scrubs first aired in 2001, the theme song I'm No Superman by Lazlo Bane played over the opening credits including a full verse and chorus to accompany scenes of the actors pantomiming doctory things. Eventually, that was distilled to just the chorus. By the series close, all that was heard was a jangly guitar chord and the final line of the song "...I'm no Superman" accompanied by a title-card that read "Created by Bill Lawrence."
It's hard to imagine that a culture that once rapturously sat through entire operas and symphonies now cannot be bothered to listen to a song that lasts any longer than the amount of time it takes to make a bag of microwave popcorn. The focus of our lives has shifted, though, from what others have to say to what we are willing to hear. And that has resulted in shorter songs, less dialogue (and more explosions) in movies, and even anxiety whenever a church service creeps over sixty minutes. But when we tailor our lives to our tastes, we miss out on the obvious truth that growth comes from discomfort. We broaden our horizons when we hear more. We become deeper, richer, and fuller when our timepieces tell us it is time to move on and we elect to stay and lend our attention anyway.
