Daily Archives: November 20, 2008

On the importance of ignoring your problems

I’ve been having a great time at Microsoft over the last couple of months, but the ramp to full productivity is very steep. Recently, I’ve been working on an important improvement to some monitoring software, which requires a fairly good understanding of part of the system. It can be a little overwhelming trying to design something to handle all the nuances involved. Add to that the time crunch, and things get a little interesting. Last night, I ran into a little wall where I was uncertain about how to proceed. This kind of situation is always a little precarious. I was worried because today and tomorrow I have full-day training and won’t be able to dedicate a lot of time to solving this problem.

Half way through the training, while discussing something tangentially related to my problems, I realized the technical solution to the specific issue I was facing.

Sometimes you just need to ignore the problem for a while, and come back to it from a different angle.