Breaching the wall when stuck in a project

Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Red_brick_wall_texture.JPG

Often we find ourselves stuck in our projects. You put in the time and effort, yet there is no perceptible progress. You've hit a wall and you crouch beside it in defeat. Through experience, each of us comes up with our own tools to breach or circumvent the wall. Here is my getting-unstuck toolkit that seems to work reasonably well in projects ranging from lab research and writing articles/theses to designing and developing prototypes and products, largely in engineering contexts. Some of these tools are just repackaged clichés and others that I can pretend to be a pioneer in until someone corrects my illusion. If you have some tools that you do not see in my kit yet, I would be happy to hear from you.

1. Look at the wall from afar
Constantly looking at the same problem from the same vantage point tends to produce similar thought processes. You can break the thinking loop by changing your perspective which is essentially comprised of two aspects: proximity and angle of approach. By proximity I mean the distance between you and the problem. Are you looking at it at a very microscopic scale, considering only local features? Take a step back, see the bigger picture. Zoom out, observe your subject, and then zoom in again. The key is the time you spend afar. If you do not spend enough time observing from the farther distance, you might find yourself falling back into familiar thinking loops.

2. Change your angle of approach
The other way to change your perspective is to change the angle of approach. If you were previously going head on into the wall, try going at a slant. For example, if you were trying a hands-on experimental approach, may be it is time to look at the theory again, or try a computer simulation instead. If you were tackling a phenomenon in your lab prototype, may be it is worth looking for similar problems in some industrial products. If your approach is too technical, may be it is time to try a more layman approach, agnostic of many of the details.

3. Go around
With all due respect to walls, some of them just do not need breaching. Do you really need to solve that problem? Sometimes, going to the other side is a mere matter of going around the wall, trying a different route, or even locating the door. Ask yourself if you are being that fly banging against the same glass window when the adjacent one is open?

4. Take a break
This one is much too trite, yet seldom not right. You know you are utterly stuck, and it is not the time to push harder. Changing your physiology and your surroundings can change the way you think. Get out of the desk and walk, run, bike, play, shower (colds ones can really kick you out of your brains)—whatever activity suits your taste. During my PhD days, playing cricket a couple of hours a day was my preferred release. I remember Professor Arindam Ghosh, an accomplished condensed matter physicist, being one of the few faculty members at the Indian Institute of Science who would 'play and break the thinking loop.'

5. You are not alone
As much as the wall might seem personal, it is probably not. People have been there before you. So you google your problem and despite your best keyword game and your clicks on the forty-second search page, this devious specific wall has somehow avoided mention in any forum. Thankfully, there are people other than strangers on the internet. Ask someone you know, discuss with a colleague or friend with relevant or related experience. Even if they do not have an direct solution, they might point you towards an alley you did not know about. In the words of Rolf-Dieter Heuer, former director general of CERN, "You just have to look around. Then you will see all the others who have the same difficulties." Sometimes, the very act of trying to articulate your problem triggers a possible solution. As astrophysicist James Guillochon says, "If you are stuck on a problem, write a long email/message to someone who can help (as detailed as possible) but don’t send it. Very often you’ll figure it out in the process of writing that message." A similar method used in the software engineering world is called rubber duck debugging, and we all need our rubber ducks.

6. Ping-pong between walls
It is good to have two (or more) brick walls (e.g. research problems for a graduate student) to bang your head against, so that you can ping-pong between them, all the while making some progress without losing your sanity. The core idea of ping-ponging is to hit different walls which is possible only when there are more than one of them. From this perspective, it is probably not a good idea to have only one problem to hit your head against. Diversity in the nature of problems you handle can help in honing your problem solving skills even while it seems that you are continuously failing at various altars. Author Stephen Birmingham underlines this approach in his practice, "I always work on two things at a time. When one goes flat, I turn to the other."

7. Skip step three
If a task has 10 steps and you are stuck in step-3 for a long time, jump ahead to get started on any of steps 4-10. Many a time, they don't necessarily need the earlier step to be completed and you make some headway while you're still stuck on step-3. Sometimes doing steps 4-10 can facilitate getting unstuck from step-3. Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk seems to endorse this approach: "When I’m blocked, which is not a grave thing for me, I continue writing whatever takes my fancy. I may write from the first to the fifth chapter, then if I’m not enjoying it I skip to number fifteen and continue from there."

8. Small is big
It could be unfair on yourself to directly target a big hurdle when you haven't had experience tackling smaller ones. Mathematician George Polya said it better than I can, "If you can't solve a problem, then there is an easier problem you can solve: find it." Sometimes, there are smaller walls hidden inside the big one. The largest of walls is made up of bricks. Chip away at the smallest scale, one splinter at a time. This is the opposite of zooming out. You have zoomed in so much that you can see individual grains of sand that you are capable of tackling. "Do the good that’s in front of you, even if it feels very small," says American author Sharon Salzberg. 

Sometimes it is not that the wall is insurmountable, but that you do not seem to find time enough to address the wall. English author Fay Weldon furnishes the required inspiration here, "I write in short paragraphs because when I began there were always children around, and it was the most I could do to get three lines out between crises." Professor Richard Felder provides further clarification on this idea, "Don't wait for that 'block of time' to get things done. Do the task in short bursts with whatever time slots are available."

9. When stuck in a sinkhole, write
I was once visiting the Dead Sea when the tour guide took us past some large sinkholes and brought up an intriguing story of an Israeli geologist Eli Raz who fell into one of these ditches. While he was stuck there for fourteen hours, waiting for the rescue team, he wrote a diary entry on his observations and experience of being inside a sinkhole. Lesson: When stuck in a sinkhole, write about your experience. Someone will later find solace, if not solutions, in reading it.