"It saves time"

The third belief is that the jump is efficient. The story was heading somewhere, you got there first, and everyone was spared the last twenty seconds.

The same medical studies let us check that. Marvel and colleagues found that patients who were allowed to finish their opening statement took, on average, six seconds longer than patients who were cut off. Six seconds. That's the whole saving. Naykky Singh Ospina and colleagues, in 2019, looked at a hundred and twelve recorded consultations and found that where clinicians did ask patients what they'd come for, they interrupted two-thirds of them, after a median of eleven seconds. The patients who weren't interrupted took a median of six seconds to say what they wanted. Six. The doctors were jumping in at eleven seconds to save time on a statement that, uninterrupted, would have been over at six.

I'd put it this way. The fear behind the jump is that if you let people finish, they'll go on for ever. The evidence, in the one setting where someone's timed it, is that they don't. They stop, and quickly, and the interrupter was usually the one who made the exchange longer, because now there's a redirected patient, a lost tail, and a concern that comes back at the door.

The door is where the real cost lives. Marvel's late-arising concerns were the things patients hadn't managed to say at the start, coming out at the end when there was no time for them. At dinner, that's the thing your partner mentions three days later, sharply, that you didn't know was a thing. In the meeting, it's the objection that Priya didn't get to make on Tuesday and makes by email on Thursday, to everyone, by which time the decision is half-implemented. You saved twenty seconds and spent an afternoon.

There's a domestic version of the saving, and it's "just get to the point". Said to a partner or a child mid-story, it's a jump with an instruction in it, and the point it demands is the shape without the tail. The child learns to give you the shape. Two years later you'll wonder why they never tell you anything, and the answer is that you asked them not to.

So when you say the jump saves time, I'd ask, for whom, and over what period. In the moment, for you, a few seconds. Over the week, for everyone, the reverse. Efficiency in conversation is letting the tail arrive when it's cheap, which is at the finish, instead of paying for it later when it's dear.