Have you ever gotten stuck in your work, taken a break, and when you came back, you immediately found the solution?
Taking breaks clears our minds, reduces stress, and helps us think better. But its most magical factor is that it resets how we look at problems, which allows us to see what we missed.
Information is important, but what's even more important is to only have useful information. But it's hard to find useful information.
To a delivery driver, whose goal is to deliver the package from A to B at time X, it's obvious what the information that's useful to him is: A, B, and X. To the founder of a company, it's not obvious what he needs to know to orient his company toward the best direction.
Information is everywhere, but essential information is not. Essential information is not always gathered neatly in one place for your use. It is scattered everywhere, and how scattered it is depends on your scope of work.
For example, if you are an employee without being a boss of anyone, your main responsibility is just getting your tasks done. But if you are a manager, not only do you need to get your tasks done, but you also have to help your team members get their tasks done. Because your scope of work is bigger, the information you need to find is more significant and more scattered.
Because useful information is not in one place, the worst way to find it all is to stay in one place and hope where we are staying already has all the information we need.
It can happen either when you excessively focus on granular details that obscure the broader perspective:
Or when you try to obtain a general overview that causes you to overlook crucial specifics:
Because useful information is scattered everywhere and we can only find some of it at a time, the best way to find it all is to interchangeably change our focus by zooming in and out to spot all the missing spots.
There's a high chance you already do that. Whenever we start a new task, we zoom out the most to get the picture, gather information, check requirements, and plan how to execute it. Then, we zoom in to focus on implementing the work.
The drawback of this flow is that, although it changes our perspective (from zoom out to zoom in), the change only happens one way: narrowing down. The deeper we delve into a task, the more we concentrate on the specifics.
So, if we miss the chance to collect crucial information initially, retrieving it later will be challenging, as our focus has already sharpened to the more specific details.
There are some ways to tackle this.
Because the faster we zoom in, the more likely we are to miss important information, the first solution is simple: we just need to slow the process down. But of course, it isn't guaranteed that we will catch all critical information just by being more careful.
Instead of trying to be careful and hoping that we don't miss any information on one progression of narrowing down, a more resilient solution is to increase the iterations.
And that's why taking more breaks is one of the best things you can do to improve your problem-solving efficiency, especially when you are stuck.
So many times, I find myself unable to abandon a solution, despite knowing that it won't work, just because I have already spent so much time and effort on it. No matter how much my rational self convinces me to try a new way, my emotional self, which is stronger, persists with the flawed approach.
Although taking a break doesn't help me immediately see a better solution, it allows me to be less attached so that I can be more open to the alternatives.
Taking breaks doesn't help us to change our focus from one specific thing to another. It resets our focus. It helps us to zoom out again.
I think the reasons why taking breaks is so great for unsticking is that:
1) People tend to zoom out when they are positive, and tend to zoom in when they are negative
2) When we are stuck, we are negative
So when we are stuck and being negative and zooming in, taking breaks helps us loosen our mind, which doesn't necessarily make us positive, but it does neutralize our emotions, which helps us be less negative. And when we are less negative, our zoom spreads out.
Besides taking breaks, another way to reset our lenses is to explain what we are doing to others. Because we have to go all over the problem again when we explain, this act forces us to zoom out, which gives us the chance to see what is missing.
If you don't have anyone to explain to, you can talk to Mr. Rubber Duck, which is actually a widely used approach in the software development industry.
Many programmers have had the experience of explaining a problem to someone else, possibly even to someone who knows nothing about programming, and then hitting upon the solution in the process of explaining the problem. In describing what the code is supposed to do and observing what it actually does, any incongruity between these two becomes apparent.
Whatever methods you use, rubber duck, writing, imagining having a fake conversation in your head, as long as you re-traverse your path, you are giving yourself the chance to notice what you didn't.
Ideally, it's still best to find real people to talk to, because, unlike rubber ducks or imaginative conversations, real people can give you a glimpse of their perspective.
Because their eyes are fresher than yours on the matter, their lenses are more zoomed out.
There were countless times when I was stuck; a colleague would randomly walk by, look at my screen, and point out a very obvious thing that I had failed to notice for hours, which solved all of my struggles.
Plus, because people's lenses are different (like a manager's lens is usually wider than his teammate's), even if 2 people are at the same stage of handling a task, the difference in their perspective can still be helpful to each other.
The longer your lenses are in the wrong place, the more time you lose not finding the necessary information. The ability to change your focus at the right time, hence, is crucial.
I hope there will soon be a cognitive technology that can prompt our minds whenever we use the wrong lens. That would be ideal, saving us tons of time every day. But since we don't have it yet, practicing and setting up systems to aid us is the best we can do now.
Originally published at https://tednguyen.substack.com
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