When you are hooked into an exiting novel, your brain savors every word, construct a complex mental image of the story and cannot wait to turn the next page.

Things are different with that business plan, strategy document. Face it, ploughing through them is something our boss told us to do (we better be able to answer those key questions this afternoon), or it is a necessary evil to cut through an endless flow of investment options and get to - finally - meet the exiting ones next week in person.

The bored brain is lazy. Think about that when designing your next presentation. You are creating charts for the wandering eye which is desperate to speed-read over less important passages. You are spoon feeding the visual images ready-made so the lazy brain does not have to construct them by itself. The lazy brain is desperate to make the go/no-go decision as early as possible, and the good thing about a "no" decision: you can move on to the next document, so make sure you postpone that "no" for another page, another page, and then one more.