General Considerations and Strategies for Detecting Problems

[Molaskes]

While we usually can name various problems that we are aware of already, we usually cannot deal with all of them at the present moment, and in fact often are reluctant to invest a lot of time and energy into solving a specific problem precisely because we are aware that we do not know whether it’s the right problem to solve right now or whether there are others that we should rather focus our very limited resources on. The First Step in the BWTT Workflow is there to minimize this inhibiting uncertainty, and to create as full a list of problems as possible to unburden our memory stress, extending our capabilities of intelligently managing our problem-solving powers beyond what we can keep and process in our heads unaided.

By creating and keeping up-to-date a list of detected problems to enter one by one in the next Steps of the BWTT Workflow, we gain overview, insight, and control. While we may quickly forget a specific problem over others, over our busy everyday lives and occasional times of higher stress, and sometimes even crisis, in our lives, maintaining a list ensures a reliable storage that unlike our multi-tasking brains does never forget.

A problem that is forgotten or overlooked will simply not be worked on to get solved. While a well-maintained list prevents from forgetting once detected problems, we also need to employ problem-detecting strategies to not overlook any significant ones. As we have very limited resources as individual biological beings, we have evolved to overlook and forget very much, because the self-regulating nature of our environment (biology, geography, socio-psychology and other aspects of it) makes optimism reasonable, the hope that problems will “solve themselves” over time, or will get solved by other people.

However, in the complex and highly unnatural world man has created, this laziness does more and more fail its evolutionary purpose of conserving our energy for better survival. Thus we must beat our hereditary laziness and naivity by a clever methodology that will make sure we will overlook hardly anything anymore, nor forget anything anymore, and all that in such a way that we are not overtaxed in our nature, rather feel at ease,
and now much more justifiedly so.

To revise the list of problems in regular intervals, taking this as a cue to search, to scan for new problems or problems that had been still overlooked before, is the best method here, as we can well bundle our energy and make time for bursts of focused work, after which we need a phase of relaxation, of busying ourselves with other things, especially with other things than finding problems, which when done excessively, and without the prospect of successfully handling each problem as in the BWTT Workflow, is a sure way of developing a heavy depression, which should of course be avoided, both for the sake of health and for the sake of an effective and efficient BWTT.