Exactly. You can add explanatory background and disclaimers after you state the bottom line. Not only is this better for my patience but it also helps with comprehension.
This kind of exchange kills me ever so slightly:
**Me: **“Has the front office approved us releasing the memo?” Inefficient communicator: “We had a meeting yesterday to talk about the memo. Our team and the policy staff were there and we discussed options for moving forward. Concerns were raised about putting sensitivities in writing. Leadership decided that the preferable option is to have a teleconference.”
So the answer to my question is…no. And yet, why in the hell is “no” not anywhere in this response? Like, why are you telling me about a meeting that you know I already know happened? I asked a yes or no question, but instead of getting a yes or no response, I have to consume precious mental energy inferring from a multi-sentence paragraph that the answer to my simple question is no.
Is it that hard to say “No, front office wants to scrap memo idea and go with a teleconference.” No, it’s not that hard.
Equally bad, if not worse, is the person who feels compelled to have a related story about everything. I was at lunch with a group, including someone I’d just met and wanted to get to know better, and one woman there would not shut up. I pretended to be polite and interested for a bit, till I realized she didn’t understand the concept of conversation. I began to deliberately ask the new person specific questions, hoping to derail the motormouth. In any other social situation, that would come off as rude, but holy crap on a cracker, sometimes it’s the only way to derail a monologue.
Maybe I’m getting crabby in my old age… on the other hand, I do try to pay attention to body language to be sure I’m not the motormouth.
Here’s one sort of thing I encounter all the time:
Me: How long can you stand?
Claimant: Not too long.
Me - politely explain that sworn testimony is different from a casual conversation, that “not too long” can mean different things to different people, and that some specificity is useful.
Claimant: 10 minutes.
Me: Thank you. How long can you sit?:
Can you guess the response?
What I often encounter is, never provide a simple answer to a single question, when instead, you can force the other guy to ask 2-3 more questions to get at the specific info the first question sought!
But that differs from the OP. Which I experience all the time. The above scenario would go:
Me: How long can you stand?
Claimant: Well, my back has been hurting me. I was just telling my friend the other day… You know my little dog, her name is Trixie…
5 minutes later Me: Can you estimate how long in terms of minutes? Or else, if I try to redirect them to answering the quetion, and they perceive me as rude.
Even the freaking lawyers. You might not believe how often I find myself saying, “Well, that was a fine answer to a question other than the one I asked.”
I don’t know who said it, but it’s true: The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.
I had a friend like that once. During a long discourse, I snapped, after I asked her if he’d talked to a mutual friend about our plans, she started in with “I saw him yesterday about 2:00 when it was raining, and he was walking the cutest dog that I’ve ever seen. Sort of like Keesha’s dog, but with more black than brown. And he was wearing blue pants. Not blue like that building over there. More blue like that lamppost.”
I said “Will you just answer the question? I don’t need a twenty minute runaway.” She started crying.
Butt in and say “I missed some of that”…they will respond with…“what part did you miss”…then I respond with…“the part after ‘listen carefully mallard’”.
I have to point out that there is a difference between someone who is long winded and someone who struggles with the concept of narrative.
My boss retired a few months ago but I’ll tell you what, that guy could talk. The moment he came into my office, I knew I’d lost an hour. But all of what he said had a point, and it was constructed in proper narrative form. Everything he said led to logical points and conclusions, and you got something out of it, there was just ghastly amount of it.
Anyway, I wonder if a lot of this is something people pick up in school, where, as Dave Barry once joked, instead of writing “Children cry when they fall down” you’re encouraged to write “When minors engaged in vertical gravity-inducted impact states there is a strong likelihood of lachrymatic responses.” Few people have taken courses in efficient communications, but it’s a wildly valuable skill, and it’s hard.
Please buy one of these. It would make the world just a little bit better to know that someone out there was doing what you described with one of those.
Ms. P does it, and knows that I scan for the main point and zone out during the rest. Lack of attention to detail certainly isn’t the issue; it’s more that she is such an extreme detail person that I find many of them to be irrelevant. Fortunately, this is something that happens occasionally rather than every day.
Ah, you’ve met my husband. Every day is an epic saga of woe, elation, ennui, and excitement. I actually find out how his day went and what, if anything, happened 45 minutes into the recitation. After 27 years, I just go with it. Sometimes if it goes too long I’ll reference Mark Twain’s Jim Blaine and his Grandfather’s Ram and he’ll get to the point. This trick does not work on many people.
Seconded. I can be long-winded, but I’m going somewhere with it.
A former boss of mine, by contrast, happens to be terse as hell, and he gets irritated when people don’t communicate with him in exactly the way he communicates with them. He also got angry when people left out any information he deemed relevant. He demanded answers that were clear, concise and comprehensive. In my head, I invited him to pick two.
I’ve come to the conclusion that my boss just hated words. He disliked both reading and writing. I learned to be more terse with him, but it’s not because he likes “efficient communication.” He just blithely decided that any communication style other than his own is inefficient. The dude couldn’t handle a dependent clause that preceded the independent clause—it was that bad.
It’s all well and good to encourage people to get to the point, but it’s easy to say “I prefer concise answers” but mean “I’m a narcissist who expects others to accommodate my every whim.”
The former doesn’t imply the latter, but narcissism does imply that kind of expectation.
I’ve got a coworker who tends to ramble on in arcane directions, giving elaborate technical explanations in response to requests for information by people who clearly neither need, want, or would comprehend such information.
My boss had been venting about this, and lately I’ve found myself stepping into the position of interpreter/summarizer. If he’s asked, say, a yes/no question, once he’s rambled for a few minutes I’ll usually cut in with a summary of the point he is circling around, or with a question that frames what he’s said it in terms of the question that was actually asked. “So what you’re saying is, it can be done, but it’ll require to you spend, what? A day? Two days? A week?” (About half the time his answer is, ‘I can do it in less time than I was taking to tell you I can do it.’ Not in so many words.)
My interruptions are greatly appreciated by my boss, though I’m not sure I’d say they’re polite.
To quote legendary pro wrestling manager Bobby Heenan, on wrestling legend Nick Bockwinkel: “If you ask him what time it is, he’ll tell you how to build a watch.”
I consider the ability to tell a good story to be a vital criteria for friendship, and I’ll happily spend all night swapping long-winded silly stories with my partner and/or friends. However, when I’m tired/rushed/stressed/need to pee, I’ve gotten good results by breaking in with “I’m sorry, my fault, but I only have about 3 sentences of attention span left right now. Can you give me the critical points?”
“Hold on, I’m confused, too much going on at once here. What you’re saying is [brief rephrasing]?” Or some variation thereof is what I use with my coworker whose head is always split into 20 different things and doesn’t take time to plan out and organize what she wants to say before blurting it out because she’s afraid she’ll forget, so it goes in circles. She’s actually good at multi-tasking, but the effort of actually completing all the tasks wrecks her language skills sometimes.
I have the opposite problem at work–I’ll ask the essential question right off the bat, because I’m afraid the person doesn’t have time and don’t want them to get impatient, then it ends up going off like a bombshell because they’re missing all the background information and they spend the next 5 minutes grilling me for the details. I guess I need to invest a tad more into my intros.
In that situation I’ll respond with a “Mostly yes” or “Mostly no” and leave it on them to decide to ask for more details or just run with it.
OP: I’ve also stated that I’ve got a meeting coming up, can I get the Reader’s Digest version. Or Cliff’s Notes version.
Those that just wanted the short answer can skip the rest of this post…
One of my previous jobs had me doing some database management. One task was to create a new table for ermzuts that had a field that I suspected needed to have a specific format and possibly be restricted to a range or collection of values. I needed to stretch my legs so rather than emailing the person who would know I walked down to his office to ask him in person. I then received an hour long monologue of the evolution of that particular reference code over time and what forms it had taken due to various regulations and whatnot. I was reminded of someone relating the backstory of their thief character in a DnD campaign.
From that point on I skipped the walk and relied on email for work related communications with him.
