Not to trivialize the consequences for the many people who have lost their jobs this week, but companies do come and go. So it goes. Stock markets crash and recover. So it goes. People lose their jobs and then pick themselves up again. Many move on to bigger and better things. Some learn valuable lessons and become better people for it. Again, so it goes.

As for the election, it looks as if the same old tactics are working. Instead of having a debate about how to solve problems, we are engaged in a culture war that has little to do with politics, government or the philosophical foundation that has gotten this country to where it is. It would be easy to say that people these days don’t care enough. Or aren’t educated enough. Or aren’t smart enough. But I don’t believe any of these things are true. People are simply being people, which means we are reacting emotionally, we ignore reason, we overly generalize (look at what I am doing right now) and worst of all we stay in our comfort zones and avoid the hard problems.

But this too is all okay. Because at the end of the day, there will be a new president. There will still be 100 senators and 435 representatives and 9 justices to help correct things along with the one guy we elect in November. Hopefully, a few of those 545 people will look at the last 8 years and decided it’s not good enough and be inspired to do better and have the courage to inspire those around them to do better.

Life is full of tough times. The sky is not falling. We simply have crashed (on many fronts) and have not yet picked ourselves up again. But we will. We always do. So it goes.

Merlin Mann has just evolved the mission of 43 folders and I couldn’t be more thrilled. I’m a productivity nerd, but I do it because I aspire to make great things. It’s the classic effectiveness vs. efficient argument. I could give a damn about efficiency, if it doesn’t come with effectiveness. If productivity tricks help free up time, but I don’t use that time to do a better job at making things. What’s the point? I’m excited to see where Merlin goes with this.

Today, I find myself traveling for work again. I’ll say that traveling for work has taught me that I don’t actually like to travel for the sake of travel. I like traveling because it gets me out of my routine, away from my every day life. It forces me out of my comfort zone and gives me new perspective when I return.

But work travel does none of this. When I travel for work, I inevitably spend every waking minute either focused on whatever it was that prompted the travel or trying to catch up on the stuff I am missing back in the office.

Regardless of the city, work trips always entail a hectic schedule that encompass mediocre hotels, restaurants you would never otherwise eat at, convention centers, office buildings, and awkward cab rides. Occasionally, you get a chance to get outside and enjoy the actual city these events take place in, but it’s always crammed in to the one free hour you have before you have to catch your flight home.

On these trips, it’s hard to believe that I look forward to travel and have to remind myself that this isn’t travel. This is just work.

For Labor Day weekend, I took a mini-vacation and met my sister and brother-in-law in San Diego, more specifically Encinitas, CA. It took us about 15 minutes to decide to do it and 30 minutes later I had plane tickets and a hotel room booked. That’s all it takes. A will to go and of course the financial means to travel (I’m not advocating credit card travel). But I know so many people who have the means, but don’t have the motivation, so I wanted to highlight how easy it is.

We stayed two blocks from Moonlight Beach, a beautiful beach with warm water and a great atmostphere. On Saturday and Sunday, we woke up each morning (without an alarm), went for breakfast and then made our way to the beach, where we enjoyed lazy afternoons in the sun. On Monday, we drove out to San Marcos where our aunt and uncle plus two cousins live. We spent the day with them hanging out by the pool and enjoying some delicious bbq. It was great company, great scenary and best of all a great mini-vacation to break up the routine of every day life.

If you feel like you need a vacation but just can’t get away, try to plan a weekend mini-vacation. I find that just getting out of my routine helps me to reset and recharge.

In October, I started to experience some vision problems. It wasn’t long after I had had my annual opthalmology and optometry appointments and I thought that maybe the place I ordered my contact lenses from had screwed up my order. At first it just felt like my contacts didn’t fit quite right. If I would blink, my vision would be sharp, but then it would gradually degrade. Blink again. It would clear up. Rinse and repeat.

Going into the holidays, I got busy and did my best to wave it off as allergies or dry eyes or something else ordinary. Yes, I realize this was completely irrational.

But by January my vision had noticeably degraded. I was playing in a hockey game, standing at the blue line in my own zone and I couldn’t find the puck. Now my vision has never been that great. I was born three months early. As a result, I’m severely nearsighted, I have scarring on my retina in my left eye, I was born with cataracts in each eye and I’m so right-eye dominant I effectively have no depth perception. When those stereogram prints were all the rage in the early 90’s, I used to stare at them for hours to no avail.

So I often had a hard time finding the puck in a hockey game. But I had learned a lot of visual cues along the way to help me find it when I lost it. For example, look where everyone else is looking. Most people I played with had no idea I had vision problems. But something was strikingly different about this experience. This time, I knew where the puck was. I could tell by the actions of everyone around it. But I couldn’t clearly see it. Instead I saw a blurry black dot. I blinked thinking I had sweat in my eyes. But this time it didn’t get sharp.

Then I started noticing it in every day life. Stopped at a red light (on my bicycle - don’t worry I’m not a cyclops driver), I couldn’t read the street sign across the intersection. The weird thing was, it wasn’t that the letters were too small. This I was well accustomed to and wouldn’t be any cause for concern. It was that they were blurry. Now I’m used to blurry - when my contacts were out. But this was the first time I had experienced blurry with my contacts in.

I’m an amateur photography and photography terminology provides the perfect language for this situation. Being so nearsighted that my vision couldn’t be entirely corrected even with contact lenses meant I was used to things looking so far away that I couldn’t read them. But the world was in focus, sharp if you will. Letters being blurry was a new thing and a bit scary. This was the trigger that pushed me over the edge to go back to the eye doctor.

I went to my optometrist thinking it was a problem with my contacts. Because my vision is so severe, she had to order lenses for me. They didn’t exactly have trial lenses on hand in my prescription. So I had to return in three weeks. A few weeks later I came back and the lenses she ordered didn’t help. So I had to come back a few weeks later and try more lenses. And then those didn’t work. And then the next ones didn’t work.

Now I’ve been going to the optometrist since I was 2 years old and I hate it. It doesn’t seem scientific at all. I’m supposed to tell you which is better: 1 or 2. Are you kidding me? They are both blurry and frankly isn’t there a better way to do this. So going back to the optometrist every three weeks was not my idea of a good time. Not to mention that while my optometrist was very patient and persevered, she didn’t do a great job explaining why she was having a hard time finding the right lens.

Now I can be a bit of a hypochondriac like the best of us, and after several trips to the optometrist and meanwhile my vision was getting noticeably worse week after week, my imagination kicked in. Maybe it’s not a contact lens problem. Maybe my retinas are deteriorating. After all, that’s a risk for people who are born early and I had retina problems as a kid. Or maybe worse, maybe I was going blind. Or worse yet, did I have a brain tumor? You can see how this would be nerve wracking.

At some point my optometrist mentioned that she was having a hard time nailing down my astigmatism correction. Oh what a relief. That sounds perfectly normal. Oh wait, but then she continued. She explained that every time I came in, she got a very different reading. Hmm, I thought, is this more odd-ball optometry science. But that’s when she recommended I see a cataract specialist. She explained I might need surgery.

Okay, eye surgery sounds scary. Frighteningly so. I mean we aren’t talking lasik. For cataract surgey, a human being, cuts your eye ball. There’s plenty of room for human error. Oh and I forgot an important part. It was my right eye - the better eye, the severely dominant eye - that was having the problem. It was getting so bad that I was closing my right eye to see better. That might not mean much to those of you with two good eyes, but my left eye vision is about 20/100 - for those of you with 20/20 vision that means something that looks 20 feet away to you, looks 100 feet away to me. And at this point that was my better eye!

So while eye surgery scared the living daylights out of me, this was great news. This sounded like a solvable problem and it had to be better then coming back to the optometrist every week, where each time I would get my hopes up all over again that this time we’d get it right, only to go home still trying to read the blurry signs.

So I said sign me up. Point me in the direction of the cataract specialist. This was in April. I saw the cataract specialist a few weeks later (everything happens in few weeks increments when you are scheduling doctor appointments) and she said I may benefit from cataract surgery. May? What the hell does that mean?

Okay, so they can’t guarantee anything. Eyes are complicated. My eyes are especially complicated. My symptoms sounded like symptoms that would be caused by a cataract, but there could always be something else. So sure we’ll go ahead and cut your eye open, but no guarantees. Um … okay. I think. Thanks for inspiring confidence.

By the way, in case I hadn’t mentioned it before, I’m not 80. I’m 31. Most people who have cataract surgery are 80. This apparently is the kind of thing that every nurse I encountered felt the need to point out. From the scheduling nurse who set up my appointments, to the nurse who gave me my pre-op instructions to the nurse who admitted me. Right, so feeling very assured that I was a freak of nature, i went ahead and decided to do the surgery.

So talk about an emotional rollercoaster. Part of me couldn’t wait to have the surgery. I hated feeling helpless and while I’ve never had good vision, I was always able to get by without most people noticing. But the other part of me was scared to death. They were going to cut open my good eye!

Fortunately, the surgery came and went and it was a piece of cake. They decided to do the surgery under general anesthesia because I have a lot of uncontrolled eye movement. This basically means i checked in, got some eye drops, an IV, met the anesthesiologist and then got to take a nap. I woke up and had one of the most amazing experiences of my life. This is going to sound trivial, but for me, it was just the beginning of a life changing event. I woke up in the recovery room, and while I was ridiculously groggy from the anesthesia, but even in this state, the very first thing I noticed was I could read the clock across the room. The numbers were sharp. There were no halos. I laughed out loud. I was so relieved. The surgery worked.

Reading a clock may not mean much to you. You probably do it every day. But it was a very big deal to me. On the ride home, I read every license plate and street sign. I giggled. I was elated. The world seemed zoomed in and sharp as a tack. I felt like a kid who had just learned how to read. I was in awe of every street sign I passed.

That was about 5 weeks ago. Before the surgery, while my vision had been deteriorating, so were my hockey skills. Playing hockey with limited vision was disorienting. I became timid. Normally, there is nothing timid about me. I stopped trying. I started to look down, because from my head to the ice was within my depth of focus, but across the ice to a teammate wasn’t. I stopped passing. I would often look lost and confused on the ice - it turns out I was both.

Two weeks after my surgery, I played in my first hockey game. I was like a kid at Christmas. It was the first time in 11 months in which I could see clearly. I loved it. But having not tried for months, I was woefully out of shape and wasn’t very comfortable on the ice. Tonight, after a few games under my belt with good vision, it all came back. I skated hard. I won battles along the boards. I scored a goal. More importantly I set up a teammate’s goal. I knew who was who. I knocked a puck out of the air (a good feat given that the surgery didn’t help my lack of depth perception). But most importantly, I had a ton of fun. I remembered why I play this game. It brings the best out in me. It makes me want to compete. It makes me want to make those around me better players. It makes me be someone I want to be. It’s cheesy, I know, but every word of it is true.

I read that cataract surgery is one of the most common surgeries performed in the United States. I will say, there is nothing common about the results. It has completely changed my life. I’m sure they will never read this, but I want to thank my optometrist for not giving up, my surgeon for being good at her job, and my surgeon’s nurse for reassuring me that there was nothing scary about it at all and everyone else who played some part in making me see clearly again. Most people who have this surgery are late in their life, but I have most of my life ahead of me and the future is much clearer than it has ever been (pun fully intended). I still appreciate it every single day.

In the summer of 2005, I signed up for Netflix. At first, I used it to replace something I already did. It merely made renting movies easier. But with time, I started to watch television series on dvd. I was late to the Lost bandwagon, so I watched the first two seasons on dvd. I never even heard of Firefly until it was long gone. I watched Six Feet Under and felt like I was getting HBO for “free”. It wasn’t long before I realized that this was a much better way to watch TV. Instead of watching bits and pieces of the story week over week for years, I could chew through the shows at my own pace. I watched every season of Sex and the City in about 6 weeks. The first two seasons of Weeds filled a fun marathon weekend with my brother and sister. I loved it.

After a couple of years of watching television shows on dvd, I decided I liked that format better and opted to cancel my cable altogether. That was about a year ago. It successfully cut out all the noise. If a show isn’t good enough to wait for it to come out on dvd, I don’t watch it. It saves time and it turns out you end up hearing about the really good shows one way or another. I just chewed through the last 3 seasons of How I Met Your Mother. I had no idea NPH had made such a dramatic comeback but not only did I eventually hear about it, but by the time I did there were three glorious seasons to chew through.

Watching a good television series is like reading a good book. You can’t help but watch just one more episode until the next thing you know it’s 3am. I never felt this way about television before. But then again, I used to watch a lot of crap just because it was on.

About three weeks ago, I bought a Mac Mini and connected it to my TV. It has once again completely changed the way I watch TV. It turns out when you have a computer connected to your TV and a nifty remote that allows you to control it from the couch, you suddenly have access to a whole new world of content. Sure I always had access to the content on my MacBook. But it’s a whole new ball game when it’s on the big tube.

It’s only been three weeks but I’ve already found some great content. I’ve reacquainted myself with my old friends Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert who I really hadn’t watched since I gave up cable. I’m making my way through the TED talks - if you haven’t checked these out it’s an amazing collection of talks. I’ve subscribed to two b-school classes through iTunesU - I have no shame about my nerdy academic hobbies. I discovered Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture and was blown away. And this, I know, is just the beginning.

I have a favorite saying it goes like this: “I can see the future and I want it now.” With regard to television on the web, I can now say, I can see the future and I’m starting to experience it. We live in great times.

But for now I just want to say, the best thing you can do in life is shake everything up once in awhile. I took a five week break from my regular life. This is unheard of for me. Prior to this trip, I had never spent more than 8 days on vacation. It was the best thing I could have possibly done.

I had no idea I was so stressed out. I had no idea I was so unhappy with my normal routine. I had no idea I wasn’t making any progress on the things that were most important to me.

Don’t get me wrong. i didn’t do any deep soul-searching on my trip. Flipping through my travel journal it’s pretty much about the food we ate, the wine we drank and the stupid fights I got into with my brother. But taking an extended break from regular life was exaclty what I needed to open my eyes to the fact that I didn’t really like my regular life. I was stuck in a rut and didn’t even realize it.

In the coming days, I’ll write about my trip and what I’ve done since I’ve been back to revitalize my regular life.

The good part means I won’t be watching every minute of every series. Yes, I’m saying that’s a good thing. Even though part of me can’t believe I just typed that sentence. But frankly, I have way too much going on to spend several hours every day watching hockey.

So instead, I’m going to every Sharks home game. This is bad. (Who am I?). No really, it’s bad for my wallet. But then again, I have a job and why else do I convince myself to go to work every day.

Okay, this matter is clearly more complex than good and bad. Let’s get back to the basics. I love hockey. Go Sharks!!

In the previous three posts, I outlined how to clearly define the problem, identify constraints on the solution and then brainstorm possible solutions. The next step is to evaluate the solutions that were generated during the brainstorming process.

This, in theory, should be the easiest step. We’ve already defined all the constraints and brainstormed several solutions. All we need to do now is to evaluate each solution as follows:

1. Does it actually solve the problem?
2. Does it meet all of the constraints?

First, rule out any solutions that don’t actually solve the problem. Now is the time to be critical. It is very easy to get distracted by good ideas that are tangential to solving your problem. This is where clearly defining the problem is very helpful. For each solution, ask yourself, does this solution make the problem go away. If the answer is no, rule it out. It doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea. You may still want to do it. But it does mean it is not a good solution and you have not yet solved your problem.

For the second question, does it meet all the constraints, don’t rule out a solution if the answer is no. Instead, for each solution, give it a score based on how many constraints it meets. If all constraints have equal weight, just count how many constraints it meets and use that as the solution’s score. If some constraints are more important than others, then count those constraints multiple times (according to their weight), when scoring each solution.

After you have scored each solution, first check to see if you have any solutions that meet all of your constraints. If so, then focus on just those solutions. Rule out any solution that does not meet all of your constraints. At this point, someone might be emotionally tied to a solution that is being ruled out. This may leed to another discussion about the importance of each constraint. That is okay. It is always good to question the constraints. But be sure to discuss the value of the constraints, not the value of the solution that is being ruled out.

If you have multiple solutions that meet your constraints, congratulations!. But you aren’t done yet. If you are having a hard time identifying which of your perfect solutions is the right solution, then odds are, you haven’t identified all of your constraints. If people are still making passionate arguments for one solution over another and you are not coming to agreement, then dive in and look for more constraints. Don’t argue over specific solutions. Instead, discuss the importance of new constraints.

If you have no solutions that meet all of the constraints, you have a couple of options. You can either reevaluate your constraints or you can continue to brainstorm solutions. The key here is, are you willing to compromise on your constraints. If you are, make sure it’s for a good reason. Often times you can compromise on your constraints by finding another way to meet that need. But don’t compromise on a constraint just becuse you haven’t found the right solution. Nobody will be satisfied and the problem will keep rearing its head. Instead, go back to brainstorming.

If you stick to this method:

• Define the problem
• Identify the Constraints
• Brainstorm Solutions
• Evaluate Solutions

and iterate on each step as needed, you may not always find the perfect solution, but you’ll spend far less time arguing over inadequate solutions.

]]> http://teresatorres.com/simplify/2008/04/02/problem-solving-evaluating-solutions/feed/ http://teresatorres.com/simplify/2008/03/30/problem-solving-brainstorming-solutions/ http://teresatorres.com/simplify/2008/03/30/problem-solving-brainstorming-solutions/#comments Sun, 30 Mar 2008 19:03:30 +0000 ttorres http://teresatorres.com/simplify/2008/03/30/problem-solving-brainstorming-solutions/ In a series of posts on problem-solving, I will be sharing my personal approach to finding and evaluating solutions. At times, I may also evaluate other methods or draw from other resources, in which case references will be cited at the end of the post. This is the third post in the series.

In the previous two posts, I outlined how I like to clearly define the problem at hand and then get everyone interested in the solution to list their constraints on the solution. This gives us a bounded canvas for finding a good solution. The next step is to brainstorm solutions.

Almost everyone in the room is going to have a favorite solution or be opposed to someone else’s solution. At this point, the key is to get all the possible solutions out. Use a white board. Don’t allow criticisms. That will come later.

The key to a good brainstorming session is to make sure that everyone participates and that the tone of the group stays positive. At this point, there are no bad solutions. It’s often difficult for people to be the first one to put a solution out there. It helps if you start off with a couple of your own. But be sure to not dominate the session.

Encourage people to think outside the box. If the group is focusing on the same solutions that have already been thrown out, throw out some off-beat solutions. They don’t have to be practical. The point isn’t that one of these solutions might work, but it might help people think more creatively about solutions that will work.

There is a ton of literature out there on how to run a good brainstorming session. Do your homework. Everyone is creative. When you clearly define the problem, identify the constraints and set up the right environment for creativity, ideas come quickly.

In the next post, I’ll walk through my process for evaluating these solutions.

Previous posts in this series:

• Exploring Problem Solving Techniques and Related Topics
• Defining the Problem
• Identifying the Constraints
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