Overdoing it
A friend of mine sent me this (old) video, the Microsoft iPod parody (apparently created by Microsoft to demonstrate the problems they have with packaging and the like). This got me to thinking about “too much detail”.
There is something I’m going to call “brain space”. It’s essentially how big one’s brain is – not in intellect or agility, but in capacity. By this I mean one’s ability to comprehend something fully. To do this, we need to understand the concept we’re dealing with, and appreciate all of it’s details – but we need to do this all at once. I’m not sure if this is psychologically true, but it seems there’s a limit to how many details a person’s brain can hold at once. This limit depends on the person, the ‘type’ of person they are, how busy they are today, if they’ve had enough sleep last night, and probably dozens of other factors.
Have you ever been working with someone, and asked them what to do about a particular point, only to be told “I can’t think of that right now”? It seems to me that this is because the person’s “brain space” was full, and they couldn’t fit any more details in at the moment.
Of course, pushing a task away so that you can concentrate on the job at hand isn’t anything particularly radical. It’s easily attributed to being busy, or stressed, or just focussed elsewhere.
When we think about things, we often need to be able to think about the whole problem, and all of the currently available details. As problems get bigger, we tend to break them down and think about sub-sections at a time. This, I’d say, is because our “brain space” isn’t big enough to consider the whole thing at once.
I personally find that I sometimes need a bit of time to get used to something. By that, I mean if I discover a raft of fresh details one day, then I might not be in a good position to accept more details immediately. Often I find that “sleeping on it” helps, or else just making some notes, or doing a completely different thing for a few minutes makes me more able to take on more details.
Being aware of someone’s brain space when you talk to them is important. They might not be at their peak, they might just have a smaller brain space than you, or they might have lots of other details already in their brains, so not have much left for you. Either way, when we communicate, we have to watch out that we don’t ‘overload’ the audience, either with too many details, or with “too much, too soon”.