The Empoprises Rule of List Length

I haven't come up with an Empoprises Rule in a while. I've come up with four such rules in the past. And I was just inspired to come up with another, after seeing the title of a particular article. I'm not sharing a link to the specific article, because the specifics aren't important here.

What is important is that this was a list article.

Despite the fact that "social media experts" claim that list articles are powerful, list articles truly are powerful. If I see an article that promises to show me three items, my brain is looking for those three items, and hooking on to them. The presence of a defined list helps me to retain the information that was shared in the article.

Sometimes.

One day I ran across an article that promised something, but when I saw what it promised, I really didn't want to read the article.

It wasn't that the article contained information that I didn't want to read.

It was the fact that the article began with the words "22 Examples."

Yes, twenty two.

Perhaps it's my online short attention span, but while I'm willing to read three things, or five things, I don't want to read dozens of things.

As I mused upon this, I hit upon yet another Empoprises Rule. As with all such rules, I'm copyrighting the thing so that I can make tons of money giving seminars. So here's the new rule, called the Empoprises Rule of List Length (copyright 2014 John E. Bredehoft).

If you have to take off your shoes to count the number of items in a list article, your list is too long.

While this rule is powerful and amazing, it does cause me some concern. You see, since I now have the Empoprises FECES Rule of Corporate Me-Tooism, the Empoprises RCDCR Rule of Insider Food Talk, the Phineas-Hirshfield Score, the Empoprises Rule of Anecdotal Evidence Propagation, the Empoprises Rule of List Length, and the (still in work) Empoprises Rule of Fair Food...I can only come up with a few more rules before I end up violating this latest one.