A pitting about a co-worker that was seeking praise for doing mundane tasks complete with littany as to their motives got me thinking about conflicts I’ve heard of and experienced with regards to providing too much detail in conversations.
I feel the root cause is that we each have our own world-view about what constitutes a relevant piece of information. I’ve been on both sides of the aisle here; been accused of giving too much detail, and also accusing someone of same.
It’s miscommunication in its simplest form.
An example from home (slightly modified for clarity).
ME: I’m home, I stopped to get paper towels. We were low. I wound up buying 2 megabundles because they were on sale. We probably have enough 'til August.
SOMEONE ELSE: I 'm glad you bought them but I don’t need the details of your reasoning.
ME: Yeah okay.
later a conversation about work benefits
ME: I wish we had full dental coverage, I have to get a crown replaced.
SOMEONE ELSE: When I used to work at the Federal Something Commission, under Frieda Jones who practically created the FSC, a real nice lady, I used to get full medical and dental.
ME (silently) Who’s Frieda Jones, is she someone famous that I should the name? This adds nothing to the statement that you had better benefits back then.
IMO my details were relevant. I explained why I overbought and now informed SOMEONE ELSE that they could forget about paper towels for the next few months. I’m saving SOMEONE ELSE some effort. Conversely, SOMEONE ELSEs details about a co-worker is pure fluff, a sideroad, and serves no purpose.
My sidekick at work is a TMI type. He’ll present me with a situation, I’ll make a decision, and he continues to provide the pros and cons. Yo! I already made a decision! I don’t care!
I’m not a talky person. And when I’m home by myself I just want to chill. My sister will call and start talking and gets pissed when I tell her to get to the point. All I want is the topic of the monologue! Please! Tell me what I need to know then you can ramble. I know it’s my fault (it really is, she’s not that bad), but I’m usually in the middle of something, at least mentally, and I don’t want to talk to her anyway.
I’m a botton line kind of guy, especially at work. If I feel I need to hear the thought process or details behind your problem/decision/suggestion, I’ll ask. More likely, I have already arrived at the same or similar conclusion and details are not needed. Start with the big picture and let me drill down as needed. It will save us both time.
I try to be more accomodating at home, but my wife still drives me crazy with the level of detail she thinks is necessary to communicate. My youngest daughter is the same way.
In example 1, SOMEONE ELSE is either an incredibly busy person who has his/her time planned down the the second, or is being a little touchy. In example 2, putting myself and my wife in the roles of “ME” and “SE”, respectively, I kinda like the extraneous detail because its something that might spark an interesting tangential conversation. Hey, my wife is really interesting, and some great conversations get started on random nonsense. I do, however, generally prefer to get the most relevant bit first, like: “Yeah, we had better dental with the FSC. But then, Frieda was behind that…”
Providing too much information is a difficult habit to get out of. Growing up, that’s what we had to do to see if whatever our reasoning was for something was worthy or not. If you couldn’t convince my mother that you deserved X, then there was more hell to pay than usual.
Now, I’m more of a ‘screw it’ type who says figure it out for yerself beyond a certain point, if’n my explanation ain’t good enough.
At work, I’m the TMI type on certain things (note my username), particularly via e-mail, which is why I carefully edit most of them. A note that should sound like this,
“Hey, would you mind forwarding me an invite to your weekly meeting? Thanks!”
might otherwise go out like this,
“I’ll be working closely with X department in the near future and would like to fully understand your department’s role in collaborating with IT’s and IS’s. I also need to develop an understanding of which projects you’re working on so I can ensure that we’re budgeted and staffed appropriately. To do this, I’d appreciate it if you could forward me your standard weekly meeting invite. Thanks.”
The very sad thing is that I’m a writer. Every time I write something I have to go back and wind up cutting my work nearly in half. On the positive side, since I work with government programs, it can be really helpful to be wordy sometimes - just not when dealing directly with clients or internal groups. It’s especially unhelpful when I’m trying to give another department direction. Which makes me doubly glad I actually read stuff before hitting send.
For me, it depends on the reason for the communication. At work, where I’m trying to get the information I need, keep the extra details to a minimum please.
If it’s a social conversation, then extra details are fine. As Bayard says, it can lead to some interesting tangents. “What do you mean, when you were in India? When were you in India, and what does Frieda have to do with that?”
A coworker of mine gives way too much information. Any explanation that a normal human could give takes her like 5 times as long.
For example, I called her to ask her if there was a form letter for a particular situation. There was not, but I needed to hear more! First I get what forms are available, then what forms we have already given him, and then what forms human resources has given him, then speculation about why he might want such a form. A boring 30 second conversation just blew out to an excruciating 3 minutes. :rolleyes:
I thought I was the TMI guy in the house. It comes from working from home and taking care of an 11-month-old. I just get starved for conversation.
Now my husband has turned the tables on me. I don’t know if it’s years of pent-up hostility for having listened to all my inane stories or what. I practically scream at him daily, “What is the point of your story?! It’s going on twenty minutes and it still has no point!!” Sheesh.
I do have a friend who will tack on “. . . and then I found 20 bucks.” to the end of a story that’s gone on too long. He feels it’s a service to the people who had to struggle through your story-telling to get an upbeat ending.
I’m a talkative person. If somebody’s time is sooo important that any extraneous detail annoys him or her then they should converse with me through mail.
Not only am I talkative, I’m writeative too. (And a neologist to boot! :D)
An E-mail at work that should probably read “Does anyone know why the price of the Widgetron 9000 just jumped $80 overnight???” turns into Martini Enfield Presents: An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Inexplicable and Unannounced increase in the Price of certain Electronic items, namely the Widgetron 2000, complete with explanatory notes and National Library of Australia catalogue information.
I frequently get the professional version of “TLDR” in response to my E-mails, which actually works out pretty well because there’s been a number of times that I’ve sent an E-mail to head office saying that we were going to do XYZ unless we heard to the contrary from them, and when they didn’t object we’d go ahead and do XYZ. Then they’d call us and demand to know why we didn’t do ABC instead, and I’d direct them to my communication dated (whenever) and how it wasn’t my fault they couldn’t take a few minutes to draught a “We’d rather you did ABC instead” e-mail. “You were quite entitled to make any objections at the appropriate time…” is a phrase I’ve used more than once.
My stepfather is just totally unable to tell a simple story without giving you the life-histories and a whole lot of other useless addenda of the characters/issues involved. Quite seriously, it’s a major problem because my attention span only goes to, oh, I dunno, 'bout 1/2 an hour or so before I’ve forgotten what or who the hell he was talking about in the first place.
I used to think he was just an insecure fart who liked to ‘name drop’ a lot. Now I KNOW he’s an insecure fart who likes to name-drop, but unfortunately it’s not just names: it’s a shitload of other tangential effluvia that makes any conversation with him a major trial.
My co-worker does this too, and the hell of it is, if you wait long enough, she does eventually come back around to the point of the original story. She hasn’t lost her place; she’s just dragging your ass through the labyrinth.
How is it up to me/you/anyone how much detail someone else gives when they’re talking? If you hate conversation that much, then stay the hell away from people. I bet they’d want you to, too, if they knew that when they are talking to you, you are silently thinking, “when will this person shut up??”
