Earn every line of page one
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The principle
Page one is the most valuable space in a document. It is where attention is highest, and where most readers decide whether to carry on, to skim or to skip.
Every line on page one is competing for that attention, and a line spent on something the reader does not need is worse than wasted, because it pushes the answer further down the page and takes the reader's attention with it.
This means page one has a higher standard than any other page. Every line on it must earn its place by helping the reader understand the position and the decision they have to make. A line that does not do that has not earned page one.
This is the companion to 'Put the bottom line at the top'. That entry is about order: the answer leads. This one is about the space the answer leads into, and what has to come off the page to make room.
Why it fails in practice
Most of what fills page one was never chosen. It arrives with the template. The title block, the confidentiality classification, the purpose of the report, a reminder of background matters, the name of the contact person: each is there because it was on the previous reports. Nobody has designed this from the reader's perspective. Does the reader’s first sight of a document need to be a box stating its status?
Each item, taken alone, is defensible. The report does need a purpose recorded somewhere. The contact person should be findable. The trouble is that ‘somewhere’ has ended up being ‘at the top of page one’. The important content begins halfway down the page, or on page two, having queued behind the furniture.
An example
Take the opening of a standard board or committee report. Before the reader reaches a single figure, they pass a title and status block, a statement of whether the report is confidential, a paragraph headed 'Purpose of report', a recommendation, and a background section recapping previous reports. That is most of the first page, and the reader has been told the report's classification and provenance before they have been told what it says.
What’s a better way? The first line states the position in a sentence. Below it sit the two or three figures that matter and the decision being asked for. The purpose is folded into that opening sentence, because a summary that states the answer is its own statement of purpose. The background has moved further down where the few who need a reminder can read it.
The status block, the contact information, etc can go into the page’s footer, where the people who need them will still find them but they are not being emphasised.
All of the information is still in the document but the order is changed so that its claim on the reader's attention is changed.
What to do instead
When you draft a report read down your first page one line at a time, and of each line ask: does this help the reader reach the position and the decision? Keep at the top everything that passes.
Everything that fails is not necessarily deleted, but those lines should go where they belong, which is later in the document, or perhaps in an appendix.