pjrvs — the blog of paul jarvis

slow down

i spent the good part of 10 hours yesterday working a technical problem on a website (not a live one thankfully). i tried everything in my arsenal to fix it and nothing worked. i built and rebuilt the site and it’s content many times, in various ways, and the bug wouldn’t go away. i was at my wits end, and ready to give up web development completely to go live in the forest with the other hippies in tofino.

then i went to the grocery store, came home and fixed the bug in 30 seconds. and immediately felt both relieved it was fixed, and frustrated that i hadn’t thought of the right solution sooner. after all, i’m a professional and should have known how to remedy the solution and move on.

my gut reaction when something breaks or goes wrong is to immediately rush to fix it... which rarely works out well. instead i should have stepped back and not done anything at first, except think about the problem. or stepped back, had a deep breath (or three) and not done anything but focus on being calm.

how many times in your life have you rushed to fix something, only to become caught in a downward spiral of things going less and less the way they should? when we get stressed, we tend to speed up, which seems like the opposite way to go. when you’re cool and collected, you can focus better (i’m sure it’s a scientific fact).

next time i get stressed out about a problem i’m having (with work or anything else), i am going to really try to focus on stepping back for a second and breathing.

and only once i’ve rooted myself will i proceed.

slow down – pjrvs.com/slow-down/

— paul jarvis (@pjrvsWP) January 21, 2012

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