Conan O’Brien used to have an hour-long show. Over time, he realised that he was just creating content to fill time, just using interviews with people he wasn’t really interested in to make the show an hour long, rather than filling it with stuff that people wanted to watch and he was interested in. So what did he do? Cut the show into 30 minutes of course. These constraints mean him and his team had to work harder to fill the time with content, but it also meant that they shed the filler.

Watching YouTube videos, where the length of the video can have an impact on how well it performs, and how much money it generates, you can tell that some people are putting a bit of filler into it. The truly good YouTubers understand that it’s the content that is important, not the filler. Once again, doing it for the money can have the exact opposite effect.

This is something I think I’m guilty of with this blog sometimes. A lot of my thoughts are unedited and they just appear on the page. That’s fine by me because I’m not aiming for a Nobel prize in literature, this blog is simply to get my thoughts out. In saying that though, if something does seem superfluous, I cut it. More often than not I’ve deleted paragraphs and paragraphs just to start fresh because I felt the message wasn’t succinct, or even valuable.

So, get your ideas out all you can, but make sure you refine them and cut out the filler. The world will thank you for it.