I blogged the other day about how as we work on our goals, we will run into problems and setbacks along the way. As these issues present themselves, we must be mindful to check, and double check to make sure we are solving the right problems.
I got hit upside the head full force with this one today.
I was working on what I thought was pretty basic coding – I had a small bug. But the more I worked on nailing it down, the more difficult it became to fix. Try after try, build after build failed. Since I was writing new code this whole time, I had basically dug myself into a large hole of variables that probably would be as easily decipherable as Navajo code talk during World War II.
So after several hours of this, I finally deleted all of my work, took a break and then started thinking about what the real problem was. Was it my code? Or was it something else? Maybe my computer needed to be rebooted or someone had done a database entry that was "illegal" from the computer’s perspective?
So I started back at the beginning. I broke down the process and started with nothing. I compared the apples to apples and found the real problem. To make it understandable to all non-programmers out there, I’ll explain it this way. You have to basically tell the computer whether it’s looking at a number or a word. In this one part of the database, a number was saying "Hey! I’m a word!!" – but not only that it was being quite boastful. It was saying "I’m the word 7 bow down before my wordiness! All non-believers will see how I am the king of words and will come to fear me!" (Ok, I’m kidding. No number could ever talk like that, even if it has had a few beers.)
But you can see, my problem had nothing to do with what I was solving. I was fixing how two numbers might interact together like 1+1 = 2. My problem turned out to be one of the numbers was a liar of sorts. So my math looked something like 1 + frenchfries = #*&%#
Solving the problem required me defining what the problem was.
Technorati Tags: problem solving, goals and goal setting, gtd
If you like this post, please add to your del.icio.us
