This week it’s guestblogger week on Knightwise.com where our community members step up and share their hacks tips and tweaks for cross platform geeks. We kick of the week with digital maven Gerard Moonen (Communication specialist, webdesigner and all round nice guy) telling us how he deals with Geek-OCD : Our tendency to waste away hours and hours to solve a technical problem. His answer is simple short .. and brilliant.
“The geek OCD silver bullet”
Use a timebox! That’s what I thought when I read Knightwise’s blogpost on Geek OCD. In the past I always did the same as knightwise. When I encountered a problem I just kept on pounding it until it got solved. Afters hours of trial and error or days of cranking gears in my head… nothing felt more satisfying when I finally found the needle in the haystack.
But is it effective? Nope…Not at all. I found out that when I timebox a problem it gets solved more quickly and thus more effective. I trained myself to recognize the OCD moment when I encounter a problem. I hit a timer on my smartphone and give myself a timebox of 15 minutes. If I can’t solve it within the given time I will put the problem aside. Don’t get me wrong here… Putting it aside is very hard to do. At least for me it is.
But what I learned the hard way is that when I put the problem aside my brain still keeps working on a solution. I’ll continue on other tasks and jobs and totally “forget” about my “problem”… Until I go to the gym or go for a nice long walk with my dogs… and out of the blue my brain presents me with a possible solution. This always works for me. I hope it works for you!
Links : Gerard can be found online at MoonenMoonen.nl