The Campbell Academy Blog (78)

One side of A4

Back in the olden days.

In the world I came from, we were exploring electronic typewriters as I was leaving school.

'Word processing' wasn't really a thing.

One of my best friends and I, at the time, took a course in electronic typewriting in our last year of school because we felt that being able to type on an electronic typewriter might be the future that might give us a competitive edge.

In those days, everything was printed, and although the paper was not scarce, there was still a cost to it, and to provide loads and loads of documentation on paper required thinking about whether it was worth it or not.

Now, of course, anyone born after me thinks that's utterly ridiculous.

You can type a pages document with as many pages as you like and email it all for next to nothing.

By the time you've got the hardware and the software to be able to do that, the production of the document is effectively free.

And so, back in the old days, you might think about trying to keep things on a single side of the paper because going to the second side doubled the cost of the paper you were using.

We called that 'one side of A4' the size of the sheet of paper, which was standard for an electronic typewriter.

The concept still rings true, though.

Producing more words on more screens and more pages is not the most effective way.

Where we have unlimited amounts of information, the precious commodity is insight.

And so, if you can take all of that information for someone else while they are drinking from a fire hose and unable to sift through the infinite number of bites and bits.

If you can take that information and put it onto one side of A4, then you are valuable, and you are talented and people who want to know what you have to say.