Detail Oriented?

[dr_tectonic]

Woo-hoo! The proposal is DONE! I can have my life back!

One of my collaborators complimented me on being so detail-oriented about the whole thing. My first thought was What? I'm not detail-oriented at all! I'm messy and disorganized and I have lots of projects I've never finished. I'm all about not doing things until and unless it's necessary and flexibility and context-dependence and all that.

But on the other hand, later on in the day I was editing an HTML document to get rid of all the MS cruft and make sure it was clean, and that included changing all the instances of "Step 2." to "Step 2:" because, hello, that should be a colon and worse yet, you're being inconsistent in your punctuation and it makes me itch! YES I'm going to organize and label the notecards from our group discussion before giving them to the lab director because otherwise she'll have no idea what they even mean and how pointless would that be?

So I dunno. What do you think?

[Poll #1063033]

Comments

[nehrlich.livejournal.com]

"I have lots of projects I've never finished."

I think this might be an indication of detail-oriented-ness. Your definition of "finished" probably includes getting the project to work in a very specific way that you have envisioned in your head. So it's difficult to finish projects, because you have to get all the details right, where other people might be willing to say "Eh, good enough" and never really "finish" the project.

[jennsteele.livejournal.com]

I'm finding this impossible to answer. I especially appreciate the second and third questions, since they made me think. I first thought, "Yeah; you ARE detail-oriented. And I am definitely not." But then I realized that it all depended on what the heck "detail-oriented" means.

See, people think I'm detail-oriented, because, while solving problems, I immediately identify the little details that are making things go wrong. However, if I'm not trying to solve a problem, I notice almost no details at all. Except grammar and punctuation, where, like you, inconsistency drives me batty. But I'm really a big-picture person. I can tell what details are wrong because they make the picture look funny.

So I have no clue.

[jennsteele.livejournal.com]

Maybe detail-oriented != perfectionist, but the two tend to be confused? Hmmm... I'll think some more.

[detailbear.livejournal.com]

Yes, I am. (duh)

Yes, I think that you are. If you are, that doesn't mean you can't "do" big picture, it just means you have to build the big picture up from the details.

It's the S in Myers-Briggs Type Indicators.

[k8cre8.livejournal.com]

I've found I'm only "detail-oriented" when I really care about the thing involved. Not sure how that fits into your survey. Planning an event for a large group of people? Suddenly, I'm into details. Consistently using style across web pages? Yup. Going to fix that. The name of Buffy's poetry professor? All over that. Anything I don't care about? Details aren't really important.