You don't have as much time as you think you do.

The key difference between television and radio, besides the visual element is that television is still largely a centre of focus medium while radio is a background medium, in that you can do other things while listening to the radio and therefore engaging the audience and shifting their listening from being background to foreground is the challenge that programmers and announcers have always faced, but the challenge is greater today than it ever has been.

In 2005, when I was working for the GWR group, one of the biggest regional radio groups in the UK at the time, I was at a programming get together in Bristol in South West England and in one of the breaks I was talking to Peter Sinclair, also from Australia, who was the Content Director who launched Gold 104.3 in Melbourne when it switched from KZFM and went to #1. Peter has a great radio mind and worked at many stations in Australia, Europe, the UK and Africa. We were talking about radio, as you do, when he said to me “the thing announcers and programmers forget is that you don’t have as much time as you think you do”. It was such a succinct way to capture one of the key principles of radio programming.

If you go back to the 1990 when I was Program Director at PMFM 92.9 in Perth, the then GM Murray Korff sent me to the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) Conference in New Orleans in the United States which was a big deal for me as it was my first trip to mainland USA, and it was a long trip. Perth to Sydney, Sydney to Honolulu, Honolulu to Los Angelas, Los Angelas to Houston, over night in Houston and then Houston to New Orleans. I remember getting to the hotel in Houston at 9pm local time and collapsing fully clothed on the bed and when I eventually woke up I checked my watch and panicked that I had slept in, I jumped off the bed and rushed to the bathroom and began to shave and as I was shaving I could see the reflection of the clock radio on the bed in the minor and I stopped and turned around and allowed my eyes to focus properly, it read 1am. My flight wasn’t till 11am and I realised how jet lagged I was. Suffice to say I went back to sleep, this time in the bed instead of on it, made my flight to New Orleans and had a great time in what is a great city.

But I digress, one of the sessions at NAB was by futurist Faith Popcorn, don’t you love that name, who talked about cocooning and also predicted that more and more menial tasks would be outsourced, and home delivery of meals would become a big thing as a result of the pressure on peoples time. She also talked about information overload and she used the example of the New York Times and said that if you were to read the Sunday Edition from cover to cover it would take you a whole day to read it. Many of Faith Popcorn’s predictions have come true however that was 1990, this is 2025 and we are now more time stressed than ever before. There are many reasons for this including, dealing with the day to day of living and the lack of daily planning and prioritising, frequent distractions and interruptions, unrealistic personal expectations, a fear of failure at work and information overload.

Information overload is driven primarily by advancements in digital technology and communication which has resulted in us being bombarded with constant updates, notifications, email and instant messaging, internet search engines and websites providing access to billions of pages of data, news media, as well as the sheer amount of advertising and marketing content. The effects of information overload on the brain can include heightened stress, mental fatigue, and frustration, as the brain struggles to process all those inputs, resulting in confusion, and those familiar with Ries & Trout know that minds hate confusion.

So people today are time stressed and coping with information overload which means that the time they give to evaluating the relevance of new information is typically not a lot, it’s often seconds. We know from research, that people often abandon webpages within 10 seconds if relevance is not immediately obvious. When looking at sounds or speech, your brain struggles to keep up, so it starts prioritising what to focus on. There is a concept in psychology known as selective attention where essentially, your brain hones in on sounds or information that seem urgent or emotionally significant, while less pressing details get filtered out. For instance, picture yourself in a crowded room buzzing with conversations. You might not notice the general chatter, but if someone mentions your name at the same volume, it grabs your attention instantly, standing out against the background noise.

This is essentially what Peter Sinclair meant when he said “You don’t have as much time as you think you do”. Remember people don’t think about radio as much as we think they do. To coin a term from back in the day, in a push of a button you’re gone, so everything on the air needs to impact quickly, within seconds. I don’t mean you only have seconds to talk, but you don’t have as much time as you think you do to grab their attention and shift their listening from background to foreground. Once you have their attention the content needs to keep them engaged.

It’s one of the most important principles and you need to apply it every time you write that promo, or prepare that break or edit that interview or pre-recorded bit. Your biggest challenge is to cut through all that noise which is swirling around in peoples heads, as they deal with being time stressed and trying to cope with too much information. That’s why if you manage to make a connection and shift their listening from background to foreground it’s significant, so always remind yourself that you don’t have as much time as you think you do.