This has happened to me a lot. I think, subconsciously, I’ve even begun my e-mail plea thinking that it might help me work out my problem, although I don’t know if I’ve approached it quite as proactively as you are.

It’s a great tool, and generally the joy of finding the solution outweighs the embarrassment that you had the answer all along and only “got” it when you were seeking help.

This is brilliant. Especially for folks who are better at expressing themselves in writing, as I think a lot of bloggers/journalers are.

It gives you a structured way also to let the thing brew - write it down and mull it over - you have it captured to come back to.

By the way, I like that most of your posts are pep talks/suggestions for yourself. It just works - b/c we all struggle with so many of the same things.

Would your approach be the same as a plea for assistance from your “subconscious”(to google, or not to google)? My counselor tells me that if we (I) can get in touch with this vast reservoir of information, that it will provide answers for most of our questions. What thinkest thou ?

Reminds me of what the Pragmatic Programmers call “Rubber Ducking” (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RubberDucking) — by simply verbalizing your problem, even to an inanimate object, the solution becomes clear.

A quote from this page

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2000/cs1311x/lectureSpring2001/test-strat2.html

describes the same sort of strategy:

“There was a lab at MIT that used to (or might still, I forget) have a teddy bear that you could go explain your problem to and ask it questions. You often would be able to solve your own problem rather easily, before you had to ask another.”

I’ve read about the teddy bear elsewhere (the page above was the first Google hit), but I don’t know if the story is true. It sounds right, though.

This is a very useful tip— I learned it early on in my experience doing IT troubleshooting. Simply thinking through your problem as though you were going to ask one of your co-workers what they thought the problem could be is often enough to hit on the solution without actually interrupting anyone. Whether you’re just thinking it out or writing it down, you’re forcing yourself to look at the situation from someone else’s perspective, and you’re dotting your i’s and crossing your t’s. If you’re writing it down, you now have a work log of what you have tried (and possibly in what order). All of this makes for a good CYA even if you still need to go ask someone with more experience for ideas.

Yes and yes! I’ve seen Agile developers talk about “cardboard cutouts” and I think it’s roughly the same idea here.

I do like the idea of being mindful that you can’t just blather on though — to me it works because you force yourself to think as critically as you are able.

That’s why I make sure my particular cardboard cutout/teddy bear/duck is really smart and really really busy. :)

How uncnny.

Last Fall I began writing a journal, using entries to describe some of my programming challenges. I’d write it like a narrative, explaining the problem in plain english. More often than not, simply going thru this exercise helped me resolve the challenges. I have been using Journler (http://journler.phildow.net/).

I’ve used a related tchnique to get unstuck when thinking through a problem: I wrote a “play” about the problem, which was a dialogue between me and an expert like the busy guy you describe. Just in the form of a script: Me: I’m really stuck here. Expert: What’s the problem? Me: Well, … An imagined face-to-face dialogue might get to the solution even faster than waiting for the imagined expert to reply only after you’ve composed a long email.

One of my environment books is Thinking on Paper. The purpose of this book is to free writing from communication. Before you can communicate you must first fully shape your ideas so that you understand. Once you have a full understanding then you can communicate. So free yourself from writing to commutate and just write to understand.