Being Detail-Oriented.

10 min readNov 26, 2020

…what does it really mean?

I remember when I first started working, I didn’t know anything about Excel and didn’t know much about work culture. I graduated fresh from school and I was lucky enough to be hired as a summer student in a data entry role.

I always told to be “Detail-Oriented” or better yet, work on the details. I honestly didn’t know what the hell that meant other than to double-check my work. I was living at home as a teenager and I was quite happy. My thinking was to “get through the day” rather then to check over spreadsheets.

What does being detail-oriented mean? To some, being detail-oriented means you have to be completely organized at all times. To others, it is having impeccable grammar. While another definition speaks of having to be always prepared and always asking the right questions.

Being detail oriented can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people and various context.

As I worked more, I gathered more experience, got mentored by a few folks and I collected a few tips on how to become a detail oriented person.

I want to share these tips with you if you are looking to improve yourself in this area.

I want to show you too, how to take advantage of this “weakness” to further your career.

Being detail-oriented means being accurate… but

Accuracy is important. Yes, it’s important to double check. What’s more important — I’d say much more important — is the understanding behind a task.

You’ve probably heard this before — being detail oriented takes practice — I say it’s somewhat true, but really, being detail oriented takes reflection.

It’s hard to be motivated if you don’t exactly know why you are doing what you are doing.

When I was younger, I had to enter these record numbers into an rotten Excel spreadsheet. No one could tell me what the big picture was, nor did anyone understand why the spreadsheet was set up the way it was. (Multiple formula errors. Rotten! )

That’s what was wrong. If no one can tell me how my task fits into the overall plan of the company — what’ the point?

It’s hard to be motivated if people don’t understand why they are doing what they are doing. People need to see the big picture!

Take this example, once I began to ask more questions about the task — persistently — I got a reply from a senior level manager. I understood that the data from the spreadsheet is being fed into an interview questions bank, the questions are sent to all interviewers.

There are candidates and interviewers that depend on my simple data entry for timing, having the proper interview questions and being able to pull up accurate info for reporting. I saw that what I did mattered and mattered a lot.

A job interview maybe unfair because I entered the wrong questions. A candidate may miss a job opportunity because of me. My co-workers may have to stay later if they reported on the wrong numbers.

It’s only when I saw the impact or the big picture did I understand that accuracy matters.

It also showed me that being motivated, having a purpose, seeing the overall impact of a simple task is important.

What’s the purpose behind your task?

Once you understand the reason, you will be motivated to do better. In being motivated, you will begin to look for tools and other things to help your work.

Once I understood the importance around my task, I researched up ways to mitigate errors, I started using my first “Vlookup” and using pivot tables to double check numbers. From the look ups and pivot tables came better accuracy. More accuracy became responsibilities. More responsibilities became a higher position in the end.

I hope you see this — you can’t will yourself to be more detail oriented. Being detail oriented is the by product of having researched and the result of being motivated.

Being motivated will make you want to look for new tools, new ways to improve your work. Being detail oriented comes from this action.

You can’t will yourself to be a detail oriented person. It’s just not possible. I’ve tried it and all it gave me was anxiety.

You can though — find tools — that will help you alleviate your doubts and to give you the best possible way to do your task.

How do you look for tools?

There are two questions to ask yourself —

What do you need to review and with what tool?

You have to try to narrow down on a specific area where your data is being given to others. In my case, it was a column in a report that gets generated. I will need a tool that confirms the total reflects what is being submitted. I used a simple pivot table and an if statement to see if the totals matched.

It may sound simple now, but it was revolutionary in my own world back then :)

In your case, if you are not in the data world, your tool maybe very different.

Here is a tip — if someone told you to be detail oriented, you can ask “In what way?” or “Where are you seeing errors?”.

Those are the areas you need to improve upon.

I kid you not, sometimes it’s the other person not knowing how to use a software properly and assumed you are not detail oriented.

Just ask :)

When it comes to tools, is there a future in it?

You want to invest in a tool, it doesn’t have to be a new software, it can be a new way of doing things, a new function to improve accuracy, or networking to get more eyes on it. In any case you want to invest in something that has a future in it.

In my case, I researched and used the look-ups and pivot tables through various scenarios. I knew spreadsheets was around and will likely be around for a lot longer. 15 years later, these tools are still around, and they’ve evolved to become a key piece in data modelling and dashboard building.

You can leverage off from these comments to make yourself better, more knowledgeable and more confident.

Your weaknesses can become your strength when you work on it.

How about an example?

Let’s say as an example — your task really is to in put paper files into the computer. You are told you made mistakes and need to be more detail oriented. Yikes.

What’s the big picture?

Let’s ask why they are in papers in the first place. Is there something you can change at source? Turns out there is nothing you can change at this time, but it builds into the accounting department and it’s for an auditing project. The company can be fined and you can play a role in this.

What tools can I use to improve my accuracy?

Excel has a special app that allows you to take a photo of a paper file and it becomes a table. Maybe this is the new way of doing this input? Then you can spend more energy on verifying what was copied rather then inputting numbers.
Maybe there isn’t a way to change it now, but how about at the source in the future, maybe there is a way to download all these in a database and use merges to double check the data?

Is there a future in this tool?

If not today, it’s very useful knowledge. This type of image recognition will only improve and if you can use this, it can really help the team in saving time.

Don’t worry if you are not there.

There were some days when I didn’t even want to get out of bed to go to work. I was so fixated on making mistakes and disappointing others.

Then I realized one thing — they make mistakes too. We are all human. They are not losing sleep over it and neither should I.

There are some cases when there are no tools that can help and the only thing I can really do is to ask others to double check.

It may not be pleasant to have mistakes pointed out, but think of it this way, would you rather have mistakes pointed out by a colleague or by an executive?

We are all on a journey. We all want to be better. I hope this article helps you in becoming so. :)