We’ve all been there: the alarm goes off, we’re feeling groggy, reach out and slap it to snooze. Five minutes later, the same things happens. We switch the alarm off again. The thought of getting out of bed seems like way too much effort. We know that, once we get up, we have to launch into the day – that to-do list we made last night, those  chores that need doing…

If you have to get yourself up to get to work by 8am, you’ll manage it. But if you work for yourself, if you’re a student, or if it’s the weekend, it can be a lot tougher.

Why do we end up talking ourselves into staying in bed … even when, if we think about it rationally, we’d much rather be getting on with something than going through the alarm-snooze-alarm-snooze cycle of supremely low-quality sleep?

Note: I’m not talking about depression here. If you think you might be depressed, please consult your doctor and get professional help and advice.

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As a graduating engineer myself, I have often found myself hard pressed to solve a particular problem. Everyone experiences these kinds of situations more or less frequently, and even though every single mind has its methods and nuances in how it approaches problem solving in general, there are common pitfalls that everyone seems to fall into. I would theorize this phenomena is related to the structure of thought itself – our highly pattern-based thinking is optimized by evolution to solve certain problems, which comes at a cost. Exploring the biological and physical origins of these phenomena, while certainly interesting, will not be pursued in this short essay, both due to my lack of qualifications on those subjects and the goal of the writing of the essay. What I do intend is to provide insight into some the top three common pitfalls, so you may recognize them when you inevitably run into them. If the short time it takes to read this essay spares someone an afternoon of head-banging, then it will already have been worth it.

As the astute reader will notice throughout the essay, most (but not all) of these pitfalls are related to thinking habits and employment of otherwise good thinking strategies to the wrong problems. At every pitfall I will try to provide an illustrative example, and I’m sure more than a few readers will remember themselves in past experiences where they, too, walked in circles in a frustrating battle against a seemingly unsolvable problem of the same nature. I would also like to point out that in most cases an equilibrium must be found, as for every pitfall there is also the opposite equivalent. Having that said, I’ll begin by exposing a well known thinking flaw.

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