I got to work this morning and found this on my desk:
Ductwork Layout in a building, color coded for clarity
Turns out I made this the day before. By the time I was finishing this, around hour 12, I wasn’t taking a bird’s-eye view of what I had done.
I got to work, saw it all laid out in front of me and thought it looked kinda neat. After all, it is kinda neat. My supervisor walked by this morning and said, “Ooooh, pretty”.
It’s ductwork. Pretty ductwork. Green and blue are supply ducts, Red is return and exhaust ducts.
The color coding helps me wrap my head around what is what. I’m retrofitting an existing building, and what I need to design depends on what is already there. It’s a lot to keep track of, color-coding helps me keep track of it. What you see above is one floor on one half of the building. It’s a big job. Sometimes it feels bigger than my mind.
I get sucked into this type of work. I can do it for hours on end.
It is soothing, in its own way. Each new duct I color in adds to my understanding. I assembled this puzzle in my mind throughout the day, adding piece after piece, until I understood how all the pieces fit together. I know what each piece does, and how the new pieces that I have been tasked with adding have to fit into this overall system.
Understanding calms me down. It helps me focus, and once I have understanding, I know how to proceed to complete the task.
Most problems have simple solutions, once you know what the problem is.
The tricky part, the part that may require days of coloring in ductwork, is fully understanding the problem.
Tags: Color, Dispatches, Ductwork, solutions
Yep.
Same with questions. It’s not the answers that are hard, it’s finding the right question to ask.
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog post ..hRecipe – Semantic Recipes for WordPress (Google loves these) =-.
Yup. Funny, I just had a case of “bad questions” being asked to me.
.-= Deacon´s last blog post ..Inspiration, Perspiration, Motivation, and Grueling it out =-.
That’s really brilliant Deacon. You just dropped a wisdom-bomb. I’m starring this in my reader for potential future recall. I’ll be really disappointed in myself if I don’t link to this post at some point.
Overwhelming problems/tasks always, or at least usually, have a way to get through it well if we can just stop and figure out a way to start simplifying it. I had this issue at work in my new-ish position. I’m the only person who has ever done my job because they just created it and so I am the one who has to figure out how to make it work. I’ve done a lot of creating systems and workflows to process the work well. To get it to come at me linearly, so I can execute one task at a time instead of having an information overload coming into a bottleneck. Once that is accomplished, doing the work is really quite fun and rewarding.
.-= Carlos Velez´s last blog post ..Direction, Not Perfection: Just Do It, If It Ain’t Right Do It Again =-.