We spend hours chasing urgency, but most of it will be forgotten. Johnny Carson once pulled 15 million viewers a night. By 2024, Colbert led late night with just 2 million, and ad spend had already dropped 50%. Attention moves faster than formats, and six months from now most of today’s “must-dos” will vanish too. What remains are the few choices we paid real attention to.
In this week’s email:
When formats die: Why attention migrates and formats collapse.
Pay the right attention: What really matters six months from now.
Make meetings useful: 6 rules that protect time and energy.
Around the Web: Design as system-shaper and moving ad $$$.
Meme of the Week: The eternal “this could have been an email”.
The Deep Dive
The format is dead. The behaviour lives on
Late-night television used to be the heartbeat of American culture.
At its peak Johnny Carson pulled in 15 million viewers a night. That was not just entertainment, it was a ritual. Millions of households ending the day together, the same jokes, the same guests, the same rhythm.
By 2024, the picture looked very different. Stephen Colbert, still the number one host in his category, was attracting just 2 million viewers. The cultural ritual had unravelled. The audience had not disappeared, it had scattered.
CBS cut Colbert not because of ratings, but because of economics. Even at the top of the pile his show was losing forty million dollars a year. The advertisers who once underwrote the format had already halved their spend since 2018, chasing attention into digital platforms that offered more reach at lower cost and far greater measurability.
The real cause was not jokes or politics. It was fragmentation.
First cable splintered audiences in the 1990s.
Then streaming fractured them in the 2010s.
Finally TikTok atomised them in the 2020s.
Behaviour kept moving while the format stayed still.
The important point is that comedy has not disappeared. Interviews have not disappeared. Political commentary has not disappeared. All three are thriving. They simply live in new places, wrapped in new containers, distributed in new ways.
The behaviour survived. The format died.
And this is where the story travels beyond television. Every business that relies on default habits faces the same risk. You cannot defend a format when the behaviour it depends on has already migrated elsewhere. The only viable strategy is to design for change rather than defend what is fading.
That raises a sharper question for leaders: where in your own organisation are you holding on to a format when you should be following a behaviour?
Because audiences do not vanish. They migrate. And when attention moves, money moves with it.
Pay the right attention: What really matters six months from now
Most of what feels urgent today will barely register half a year from now:
The deadline that seems immovable.
The politics that feel unbearable.
The email that interrupts dinner and insists on being answered.
They fade. They always do.
What stays with you are the things you gave deliberate attention to, in work and in life:
The catch-up you finally had with someone who mattered.
The new thing you dared to try instead of postponing again.
The compliment that made a colleague or friend light up.
In the end, it’s rarely the deadlines or the politics that shape how we look back. It’s the conversations we made time for, the experiments we were brave enough to try, and the gestures that lifted someone else’s day. Pay attention to those, and six months from now you will remember the work and the life that mattered, not the noise that didn’t.
6 rules that protect time and energy
Since COVID, everything became a 30-minute Teams call. Easy to schedule, painful to sit through. Most of them share the same flaws: no agenda, too many people, no outcome.
It’s not that meetings are broken. It’s that most companies stopped designing them. The default became “book half an hour and hope something happens.” The smartest firms refuse this. They treat meetings as design problems and solve them with structure.
Here are six rules worth stealing:
Write before you speak – Amazon runs meetings with memos, not slides. Start with a short note and five minutes of silent reading.
State the purpose – At Google, every invite declares its intent: inform, decide, or solve. If it is none, cancel it.
Put a price on time – Shopify shows the salary cost of meetings. You do not need the number. Just ask: what would make this thirty minutes worth it?
Disagree, then commit – Netflix encourages debate, but once the decision lands everyone commits. No replays.
One owner – Apple assigns a Directly Responsible Individual to every action. One name equals accountability.
The empty chair – At Amazon, an empty seat represents the customer. Ask: would they care about this?
Individually, these practices are simple. Together, they turn meetings from time sinks into accelerators. The real lesson is that meetings are not free. They are the most expensive line item on the calendar. When designed well, they unlock momentum. When left to default, they drain it.
🌍 Around the Web
✨ Design as system-shaper — The programme from the World Design Congress in London show design’s role shifting beyond quarterly fixes to shaping the very systems that define our shared future.
📉 Ad dollars migrate — Late-night TV ad spend has halved since 2018, with budgets moving into digital platforms that are cheaper and measurable. Proof again that attention moves first, money follows.
📊 Digital video takes the crown — In 2025, digital video is eating up 58% of the U.S. video ad budget, up from 29% in 2020. Total spend is projected to hit $72.4B, with Connected TV and social video leading the way.
😂 Meme of the week
A million dollars of salaries in the room… to read bullet points someone could have sent in five minutes.
That’s your Real FYI.
Now go design for behaviour, not format. Pay attention to what will matter six months from now. And for the love of calendars, make meetings useful or make them disappear.
— Toni
Founder, Real FYI
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