Lorem Ipsum

Had a performance review at work the other day. Apparently I'm doing an excellent job in every way, except for two things. ~These two things will, I'm sure, shock anyone who knows me:~

• I need to work on time management (like getting things done on time, and doing the most important things first, and not taking on too many projects and responsibilities).
• I need to work on reducing the length of my emails.

The reason for the sarcasm marks above is that these items extend into pretty much every aspect of my life. The first one has been mentioned in every performance review I've had over the past ten years; I've gradually gotten better at that stuff, but by no stretch could I be called good. The second one has only come up in recent years; I assume it was true all along but nobody felt the need to mention it. I'm just verbose as hell in written form. It all seems necessary to me, but pretty much everyone else at work seems to be able to say in a paragraph what it takes me three to five paragraphs to say. I like to think that my going into extra detail means not having to send five rounds of additional email to find out what the first one meant, but that's probably just the rationalization talking.

The thing that I just don't get, at a gut level, is that people like information and communication to be broken up into small chunks. I actively like long emails, both sending and receiving, so it's tough for me to remember that most people don't. Then, too, when I break the same amount of information into six or seven shorter messages, people get overwhelmed by that as well. I just need to learn to determine the most important point and get that across in as few words as possible. I'm a technical writer; this is supposed to be the most important skill involved in my job—figuring out the best way to communicate with a given audience, and communicating clearly and succinctly.

But given my predilection for dwelling on minutiae, and the highly associative way my mind works, and my general state of having more stuff to say than time to say it in, I'm skeptical that this is a skill I'll ever be really good at. (As you can tell by how long this entry has gotten, for that matter.) Alas.