I have a consistent pattern for solving everyday problems in my life. This is a recent example for which a solution is well beyond my expertise, or so I thought,

I was attending a live music concert. I went through the usual steps after being reminded by the host to turn my phone back on after the concert. What a clever way of telling me there should be no ringing sounds coming from my pocket for the next 2 hours.

Because I’m unsure how to handle that, I go all out and turn off everything I can think of. I have about a dozen alarms that go off either daily or weekly on my phone. I disable them for the duration of the concert. Then I turn off notifications. I’m not confident that’s enough, so I put my phone into airplane mode, turn off my cell and Wi-Fi connections if airplane mode hasn’t already done that, and finally set my volume to zero.

Now I can settle back to enjoy the music – except for the nagging thought that there must be a more straightforward solution. I envisioned a one-button solution to turn everything off and a one-button restore button to get everything back to normal after the concert.

I knew there was a ‘Focus’ app that could manage the phone’s settings under certain conditions. When I opened the app, I saw I had already set it for a ‘sleep’ focus. The conditions are from 11:00 p.m. to 8:15 a.m. It has been working well. I sleep with my phone charging in another room. I don’t use it as an alarm clock when travelling.

This is how I realized I had a problem. I could turn off notifications, but not alarms. That’s a good thing when I need to get a good sleep, but I need an early start to catch my 5:30 a.m. plane.

So, I didn’t do anything about this issue. I find I work better when I let these puzzles percolate in my mind. Then, suddenly, when I least expect it, a solution or at least a next step appears in my mind.

Pop!

I had two types of alarms and notifications, which I’ll collectively refer to as announcements, since Apple treats these very differently. I needed to test this theory out. So I turned off notifications and set an alarm to ring in one minute. Will I hear any announcements? Hopefully not.

Ring. Ring.

So that didn’t work.

Back to letting things percolate.

Pop!

This cycle repeated itself several times. Try a new approach. Fail. Give Up. Try again. Sometimes these cycles will last just a few minutes. At other times, it takes several months before the Pop occurs.

Pop! I accepted that I didn’t have the expertise to reach my goal and would look for outside help. But as luck would have it, I came across an app called Bitrig that could write the code I needed just by me talking about what I wanted. It was free for limited use, so I decided to give it a try.

It was terrific in many ways, but it fell short of the task I was faced with. So, back to getting outside help. Now to find that help without an extravagant cost.

Please give this a bit of a think. Have you ever faced a problem in your life that you couldn’t solve, but somehow the solution arrived at an unexpected time and in an unexpected way? Is this a typical problem-solving pattern for you? Do you have another consistent approach that you prefer?

I am curious about your thoughts. Please comment below or send me an email with your bit of a think.

Photo by Glenn Walmsley; the first few lines of code, created from a request to the Bitrig app.

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