A Picture is Worth 1,000 words, So Start Using Them

A Core component of the modern professional services industry is communication. There's always a constant stream of questions and requests that need to be dealt with effectively, and it's important that you use all the tools at your disposal to make that happen. Today, we're going to be talking about why you should be sending pictures. It may sound silly, but people can be reluctant to take out the snipping tool and just use a picture and learning how to use pictures correctly can make your work a lot easier to understand. 

A picture is worth a thousand words, and in the age of consistent proofreading to make sure we don't say the wrong thing, writing a thousand words can take a lot of time. However, getting a screen capture doesn't take long at all. The important thing to remember is that you need to capture all the relevant information and exclude anything that isn't relevant. Here are a couple of examples of where you can use a picture instead of writing out paragraphs: 

  1. When citing a document where a specific section needs to be referenced (and doesn't need to be recreated in Excel for any reason), just take a picture of it! Long legal documents tend to have dense paragraphs that maybe locked down in a secure PDF, which make it hard to copy and paste the text.

  2. When the person you're communicating with could benefit from what you're seeing. A great example of this is when an auditor is asking about a change in a certain set of account balances. Many audit programs and spreadsheets have information analysis tools built in where certain statistics like the percent and amount changes in account balances are automatically generated. Instead of typing on email and describing what you see, just take a picture of it, and provide a little context. This method has saved me tons of time over the years because it allows my client to see what I'm seeing and help diagnose any problems I might have. 

  3. When you'd like to send a preview of a deliverable, but not the entire thing. This is especially true for auditors and consultants, where the draft versions of the final product are kept under wraps until the person in charge of the job deems it appropriate to send a client ready draft. Many people do this because sending an incomplete draft will raise more questions than answers. However, taking a quick picture of the area you have a question on and sending it as an image in an email is a lot more manageable in this regard. 

Learning how and when to communicate in this manner is a skill no matter how insignificant it might seem. Like all communication skills, this one is certainly worth developing because communicating questions and answers efficiently will free up time and energy to focus on other things. As always, you made it this far thanks for reading! Go ahead and give this a try, you'll be amazed at how much more effective you can be by just taking a picture.