Taking time to think it out

How many of you have this issue: You sit staring at a problem for hours on end, and work that should only take a few minutes of your time ends up turning into an all-day affair with no end in sight and no clear solution?
That seems to happen to me far too often, and I think that I’ve come up with a solution. It isn’t always the best idea, like if this project needs to be done just-right-now, but if I have a bit of lead time built in (which I try to do as much as possible, save for my own impatience), I now try to set it aside for a bit, clear my mind of it entirely, and work on something else. At the very least, I can cross a few other things off of my to do list, and not be swamped when this project finally comes due. The added bonus is that when I come back, I can often see past what was originally roadblocking me, and go “man, how did I miss that before?”, while banging out the solution in a few minutes.

This has been especially true of those little bits of punctuation that hang me up. That extra indent there, the missing brace here, sometimes looking at pages worth of code lets me miss simple things. Embarrassing and possibly bad for any future careers, I know, but it’s the truth, and I know it happens to us all. Code editors don’t always find these things either. Notepad++ allows me to close up tags while working to simplify my view of a page, which is a tool that Dreamweaver is either sorely missing, or that someone needs to teach me to do. As far as that other popular paid editor, it is great at helping you to figure out where closing tags might be needed, but not when you are in a minefield of nested divs and table cells. Sometimes it seems like they almost expect the user to have a clue about what they are doing when they sit down to work, which I think is rather presumptuous to expect of me ๐Ÿ˜›

Regardless, this technique has been helping me immensely in taking the pressure and stress off of individual details and letting me focus on the big picture of a project or schedule of tasks when that is most helpful. Now all I need to do is keep up productivity, and I’ll be set!


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