Solutions mean nothing if you are not solving the right problem

For countless times in work life and in school life, we have countered this problem. People are trying to solve a wrong problem. Perhaps they think that they know a lot about some area and they want to solve a problem regarding their strengths. Some might just start solving problems that they feel like solving or maybe they don’t really know what the problem is. This is all in vain if the right problem isn’t taken into consideration.

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1998-10-13/

Everything should start from finding the right problem. That actually is the core of service design. Before you start solving any problem, take your time to define the right problem first. When you do that, solutions come fairly easily for most of the problems. As Albert Einstein once said, if he had an hour to save the world he would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute finding solutions.

Let’s think about a usual everyday problem for many people including me. How to wake up in the mornings, having slept well and feeling fresh? This is quite a common problem, am I right? I have been trying to figure out solutions for this problem for a long time. I have come up with solutions like counting sheep, going to bed early, trying to be as tired as possible so I would fall asleep quickly and so on. None of those have offered me a sustainable solution to wake up feeling fresh. Why is that? Most likely I have approached the whole thing from the wrong perspective. Perhaps I should have tried to define the right problem from the beginning. I have always just assumed that I know the problem, which is that I don’t know how to sleep well. That is most definitely true, but I could ponder that a bit deeper. Maybe the real problem is that I don’t relax early enough that my brain can go to sleep when the time is right. I am usually quite early in bed but it takes a long time to fall asleep. Even though I sleep roughly 8 to 9 hours a night, I often feel that I’m tired and I should get more sleep than I’m getting. That might also be the right problem that I should get more hours of sleep than on average, which is not happening at the moment.

It is generally acknowledge fact that we should have a regular sleeping pattern. Many people try to get rid of their sleep debt on weekends by waking up later and sleeping couple of hours more than on weekdays. Physicians typically don’t encourage us to that kind of behaviour. Altering our sleeping pattern on weekends can harm our weekdays’ dreaming. For some time now, I have practiced this method to get steady hours of dreaming every day of the week. It has worked to some extent and nowadays it is not that uncommon that I wake up feeling well rested.

Even though I have learnt to control my sleep pattern and I’m not as tired as I used to be, I might take a different approach to this problem. Perhaps the real problem is my attitude towards my sleep debt. I could change the way I think about those days that I feel tired by finding more positive things about those days. I tend to think that this must be a bad day now that I only slept 6 hours and I don’t get anything done because of sleep deprivation. Instead of thinking that way, I could focus on making the best out of that day and hoping to sleep better next time.