Surprise side effect

I'm a big fan of tailoring the message to the audience. It's one of the main principles of good communication.

So, although it is very helpful to me -- when I am learning something new -- to understand the context of this new Thing fitting into the order of existing Things, I had noticed that giving additional context did not seem to be helping one of my coworkers. The extra information seemed to just amount to extra words for which he could not find available space in his brain.

So, having realized this, I have been trying to be more Efficient in my communications with him, and this largely plays out as me simply telling him what to do, rather than explaining to him why to do it.

Which is fine, except for my growing feeling of ennui.

Ah, I finally realized this morning: every time I only tell him what to do, I feel deeply that I am leaving out important information. So I feel nebulously unhappy because it feels to me that I'm giving profoundly incomplete answers....

But it may well be that these answers are as complete as they need to be for this particular situation.

(Shrug.)