Change the direction of your thinking for better results

Sometimes I need to flow chart a process. I usually use a piece of Microsoft software called Visio. It allows you to drag and drop decision boxes and process steps, connect them with dynamic arrow style connectors and you finish up with a nice flow chart. Start at the top of the page and work your way down, boxes, loops, decisions, connectors; job done.

But not yesterday.

I started a flow chart three times following the pattern, each time I struggled to get the logic right. The chart seemed over complex and just plain looked wrong. Frustration was the outcome.

I sat down again with pen and paper and instead of working from top to bottom of the page, I turned the paper landscape style and worked left to right. Aha! It works! Within 10 minutes I had simplified and refined the chart. I then used this as the model for a computer generated one.

And I began to wonder why it had been so much easier to work from left to right rather than from top to bottom.

In flow chart terms the direction made no difference but it really was so much easier that I wondered why this might be.

Perhaps it is because we read from left to right but I wonder if our notion of a timeline has something to do with this too. Timeline is an NLP term and it can be used therapeutically to shift difficult problems or gain a different perspective on them.

Try an experiment with me. Close your eyes and imagine or remember a happy scene from some time in your far past. Still with your eyes closed point to that event in space where you imagine it to be. Is is to your left or right? Is it in front of you or behind you? Is it above or below your eyeline?

Remember that place. Now think about an event that will be in your future. It could be your retirement, Christmas or something else of significance. Point to where that event is in space just like before.

Now compare those two locations; many people will have an imaginary timeline between those two events that runs from left to right ie the older event to your left, the newer to your right. Relatively fewer people will have the timeline running from right to left and fewer yet (in my experience) will have the past event behind them and the future event directly ahead of them.

My time line runs left to right, so in a process it would be natural for me to think, left to right. Perhaps this explains why it was so much easier for me to get some clarity on my flowchart when I literally changed the direction of my thinking.

Try it and see if it can help you too.

Some days are for thinking and some for doing

Some days with your mind as sharp as a razor, clear strategic thinking is easy and insights are gained into the most difficult problems.

Then there are the days when it seems hard to marshal your thoughts into a logical sequence. Days when just keeping going is a major challenge. This what I call a plodding day; a day when things get done mechanically, without much thought.

The trick is to recognise which day is which. Trying to do your thinking on a plodding day is counter-productive and results in frustration.

Likewise, doing a plodding job on a day when your mind is fizzing with new ideas will not deliver the best results either.

So match your tasks to how you feel and be more productive whatever kind of day you are having.