Do you have trouble following instructions?

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Oh my gosh yes you are not alone in this.

Complex instructions if they require moving from one thing to another to another I can't understand at all unless I can read them out.

A lot of the time what ends up happening for me is someone will start to give me verbal instructions and I get frustrated and sort of quickly rush them along...of course this always bites me in the butt later LOL!

^^^hiya Truthseeker welcome to the club

Very much so.

Despite being told by therapists and university staff members that I am a man of, at least, average intelligence, my inability to retain information is remarkably bad. My short-term memory is atrocious and I cannot ever seem to recall events that have just transpired. My brain is truly brilliant at obliterating information.

I don't usually, but if I am given a long list of instructions verbally, I find that I have trouble remembering them and then will make mistakes. I usually will write things down in that situation.

I have trouble following instructions for many reasons. One, I don't like being told what to do. Two, I have difficulty understanding speech. Three, I get bored really easy, especially if it's something I have little or no interest in. And then so on and so on and so on.

I do best when a boss tells me "do this," and then when I do this, then he tells me, "do that."

Thanks for the welcome auntblabby...and you just put it perfectly. If someone would give me the steps bit by bit...

I think it's called executive dysfunction, and it's a b-word when it comes to school, especially in labs. Film developing, though really neat, was hard because I kept mixing up the times I was supposed to leave the film in the chemicals, and forgetting which chemicals could be poured back in the communal jars after use and which needed to be poured down the drain. I ruined a jar of chemicals that way and I'm so lucky I wasn't lynched.

somebody needs to invent an executive-free zone for people with executive issues, a place where one can just work at low-speed and low-complexity.

I can't usually remember more than 2 or 3 steps of verbal instructions, though it depends on how much sense those steps make to me. Frankly I'd expect most people would be much the same. It's always more difficult to remember nonsense. Speed of delivery comes into it too - I'm a slow thinker so if they talk too fast it won't work. And background noise and stress don't help.

Written instructions are much better. But they're often less that perfect on clarity. I never quite know whether to blame myself or the author. I saw one set of instructions on the Web for a computer procedure the other day, which said "click anywhere in the waterfall in the lower pane and choose Save As." Now I don't know whether "waterfall" is a legitimate computing term or just somebody's lazy way of describing a thing figuratively or with an "in-joke" or something, but I do wish people would err on the side of clarity when they write these things. Sometimes it's possible to work out what they mean from the context, and I think I often miss that initially.

As it's often a subjective matter to judge how much clarity is necessary in a given situation, I tend to blame the author when in doubt, confident in the knowledge that they can't easily prove me wrong. I was undiagnosed for decades, and being fairly intelligent it made sense that it must be them that had got it wrong. There's also a difference between the clarity of instructions in the scientific community (in which I worked) and the bureaucratic and lay community - in my experience scientists usually do a better job, so I tend to put most of the problem down to other people having had too little grounding in science.

Unfortunately I have difficulties following written instructions too, which I believe could be attributed to dyspraxia. But that's only a suspicion as I have not been formally diagnosed with dyspraxia.

Verbal instructions are equally troublesome as I interpret language far too literally and I cannot absorb much in my head at once.

To be delegated one task at a time would be ideal for someone like me.

I asked my therapist about this very issue and she said it is related to poor executive function. One should write it down immediately to remember all of it.

yes, yes, yes. i get overwhelmed with the verbal part of it. plus I also agree with earlier poster that many providing "instructions" often provide poor instructions that aren't linear or organized to my liking. I guess that's me.

Perhaps that's us...