With all due respect to Twitter, bite-size communication is hardly a new phenomenon. Woodrow Wilson, (as well as Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain and others!) have been credited with saying, “If I am to speak 10 minutes, I need a week to prepare. If for an hour, I am ready now.” The power of focused, distilled messaging—microlearning—has long been understood.

When it comes to safety training, “less is more” is a compelling and possibly urgent argument. In 2016, the most recent year studied by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there was a 7% spike in U.S. job fatalities. That’s 354 more than in 2015, and the first time in eight years the death toll topped 5,000. (1)