Solving Problems

I’ve recently found myself faced with a variety of different problems, ranging from solving development-related tasks to improving my time-management. Im writing this post as a quick outline as to how I believe problems are solved most effectively and quickly, as in my opinion there’s really only two steps to solve any problem.

Step 1: Definition

“The formulation of the problem is often more essential than its solution.” — Albert Einstein This quotes describes this step perfectly. You need to define the problem clear enough for someone else to be able to solve it by just reading your definition of it.

Bad Example: “This Command in my Plugin isnt working!!!!”

Good Example: “I’m unable to get this Command to work as intended. Intended behaviour of the command: […]. Actual Behaviour: […]. This may be caused by any of the following parts, but im not sure which one it is exactly: […]. The most logical solution to try is: […].”

Step 2: Executing

Now, simply execute everything written down in your definition. You’ve already done all the thinking when you wrote it, now you can simply try all possible approaches you’ve written down and continue to add on to your definition of the problem.

2 Things might happen:

1

You will be able to solve the Problem and write a complete documentarion of how you did it in the process, allowing anyone else having this problem to quickly recieve help aswell. A win-win!

2

You won’t find a solution, but will have a complete log of what the problem is, what you tried to solve it, etc. That can greatly benefit any expert who you might ask for help and save both of you a lot of time. A win-win!