What is a logical manner?

What are good ways to how to think in straightforward, logical manner?

• For a very long time, in interactions with people in my jobs and at school I always got complaints about arriving at cumbersome solutions and not thinking 'straight', i.e. arriving promptly and at the point to the heart of matters or for not 'just following the orders as told'. right now I lost a job opportunity that I was looking forward very much to because of that: they said that my code solution (professional programmer here) was too cumbersome and the presentation was suboptimal. How can I learn to think straight and avoid these traps?

• Answer:

  First, a health hazard: what I am going to say is going to be contradicting with most of the other responses. Controversial at best, my opinion must be taken with caution.   I suppose you are one of the "geeks" at school / work. I suppose you can always think of issues more academically and thoroughoutly than most of your colleagues can think, and, more often than not, more than they can comprehend. I suppose you often have the urge to explain your rationale to support your intelligent solution / suggestion / idea; and to explain your rationale, you feel you have to give them the necessary background knowledge; and by explaining the background, your communication is deemed cumbersome and non-straightforward.  If what I suppose are correct, then you are not alone.  Workplaces are full of these unfortunately smart "geeks" who can never be straightforward no matter how hard they try. They would always wonder: "I always speak what I think and do what I believe is correct (and sometimes criticized as not diplomatic enough), why am I still branded as non-straightforward?"   Now, this is the controversial part of my opinion -- being seen as straightfroward from your boss/co-workers' perspective and being a straightforward person in life are two very different things.  Your boss/co-workers do not care how straightforward you are as a person (well, not when you are making a presentation on your professional code solution).  They care only about whether your presentation/solution can answer the questions in their mind. The straightforwardness they expect is to hear something that hit those questions right away.   So, here comes the paradox: to be deemed straightforward by your boss/co-workers, you have to communicate in a somewhat non-straightforward manner. Don't just say whatever in your mind; don't just say what you want to say, but try to wear the auidence's hat and think of what they really want to know. Give them the answer. As a rule of thumb, don't bother to go through the knowledge, no matter how much you think they should understand.  Statistic shows that most people have a attention span of only a few minutes when listening to a presentation.  The chance is that, they would be happy as long as they think their problems/questions are answered. If they doubt the rationale they would ask. And if they ask, congratulation, it means you have captured their attention beyond the bare minimal level.   I hope that you feel my suggestion relevant to your situation. The reality is that I have more than once given similar suggestions to my "geeky" subordinates.  They all agreed to what I said, but so far I have seen no successful transformation.  So, possibly I am not giving the right suggestion at the end of the day. :-)