Second takes

Have you ever tried recording a video message for someone? Perhaps you’ve used Loom to record a message for a colleague or for a sales lead. Do you always send your first take? If you’re like many people you have an occasional false start and try a couple of takes, or even more. Why? Because you can.

The option to easily start over is fertilizer for seeds of doubt. “Was that good enough?” “Could I have said that differently?”

Yet, in daily conversations with those same people, how many times do you stop the conversation to give it a second take? Many decisions are best treated like daily conversation, but we can easily end up treating them like a prerecorded video riddled with false starts, second takes, and second guesses.

Size and scale

As someone that finds the size and scale of things fascinating, this research from PNAS stands out. It's titled “The total number and mass of SARS-CoV-2 virions”.

According to the research: “…each infected person carries an estimated 1 billion to 100 billion virions (individual virus particles) during peak infection, their total mass is no more than 0.1 mg. This curiously implies that all SARS-CoV-2 virions currently in all human hosts have a mass of between 100g and 10 kg. (about the weight of a bar of soap to about the weight of a toddler). Multiply their math out to 1 billion infected persons and the total weight is something around 200 pounds. In other words, all of the virions (individual virus particles) in all of the human hosts of that pandemic would weigh something like a few hundred pounds.

The size, scale, and weight of certain things are remarkable.

How long is this gonna take?

Interesting research from the American Marketing Association on perception of time and corresponding behavioral implications among consumers:

"Across seven experiments and a large field dataset, the authors find that time periods feel longer when they span more time categories, as consumers categorize time according to salient (natural) boundaries. For example, time periods like 1:45 pm–2:15 pm and March 31–April 6 (“boundary-expanded”) feel longer than 1:15 pm–1:45 pm and April 2–April 8 (“boundary-compressed”). This effect has important consequences on consumer decisions. For example, consumers prefer to schedule pleasant activities for boundary-expanded periods and unpleasant activities for boundary-compressed periods. They are even willing to pay more to avoid a long wait when it is presented as a boundary-expanded period rather than a boundary-compressed period.”

What are the takeaways from this?

"These findings provide significant insights for marketers. For instance, companies should try, if possible, to present negative events (e.g., waiting times) in boundary-compressed form and positive events (e.g., theater shows) in expanded form to improve consumer satisfaction.”