After a personal event upset my routine, I struggled to work on my graphic novel. I couldn’t focus, didn’t feel like working, and felt stuck. I needed a new strategy for solving this problem! An idea came up: I could try using deadlines again so that I would meet the dates I had set for my milestones. But not the easy kind of deadlines! The ones that would make me feel some real pressure.
So, with my partner’s help, we came up with a plan. Since I’m not great with social stuff and I hate making phone calls, we decided that if I didn’t finish 36 drawings for my graphic novel in a week, my partner would pick someone from my contacts for me to call immediately. You would not believe how stressed out I was just from the thought! But it worked. I met my goals for three weeks straight and never had to make a dreaded phone call. So logically, I would suggest this solution to you. But there is a little problem.
Because for many people, deadlines don’t work. I learned this when I was doing my master’s thesis in design. People have different problems and need different strategies for solutions. Some of the people I talked to for my thesis hated deadlines and could never work under pressure.
Other People’s Problem-Solving Strategies Can Be Dangerous
You may want to do what I did with deadlines and my accountability partner, and it may or may not work. Or maybe you already tried it and are even more disappointed because you were hoping for a solution to your problems. But that is exactly it. You have to try and experiment with different solutions and systems and find out what strategies work for you.
Never take someone else’s approach to a system or solution for granted. Yes, it worked for them, but that is no guarantee that it will work for you. So always keep that in mind, especially when someone tries to sell you something that is the solution to all your problems: What works for someone else won’t necessarily work for you. Everyone is different, everyone needs different things.
How To Figure Out Your Own Strategies For Your Problems
To avoid just copying others without any guarantee that it will help you, I made a simple guide to help you navigate through this.
- Research your problem and look for solutions and strategies.
- Try them out and tweak them to your liking.
- Remember: What works for someone else may not work for you, and that’s okay.
- Something kind of works? Focus on it and make it work for you.
- When you have found a strategy that works well enough: Use it!
- Don’t worry about making things perfect. There will rarely be a perfect system or solution.
- Your work system still needs to adapt! Check-in from time to time to make sure your system is still working for you.
- It’s okay to try and implement new things, but don’t tinker too much with what’s already working.
Conclusion
In dealing with problems of productivity, I discovered that copying other people’s strategies may not work for everyone. It’s important to find what works best for you. Stay flexible, know yourself, and stick with what helps you!
To learn more about problem-solving in general, the Wikipedia page on this topic has some good information and strategies!
In case you are wondering, I made this problem-solving animation above using Cavalry.