Spend Time Thinking
Posted On: 2010-07-01
Now that sounds like a blatantly obvious statement but when was the last time that you actually sat somewhere quiet and spent time doing nothing but thinking?
It's not something that we're programmed to do these days. If you're an adult webmaster then it's drummed into you that you have to spend your time building and submitting sites and galleries ... learning how to write compelling sales text ... chasing all the traffic you can find ... and hanging out on the boards and forums to learn all you can about the trade. But no one suggests that you should spend time thinking.
At 7.30 this morning I had to take our SUV down to a tire dealer to have four new tires fitted and a wheel alignment done and that took about an hour. The tire dealer was too far away to walk back to the office and there really wasn't any point getting the courtesy car home or to the office so I sat there are the dealer's and waited.
Now in our busy lifestyle an hour spent doing nothing could seem like a huge waste of time. I suppose I could have taken my laptop along with me and done some work but I was in a bit of a rush to get there on time and I forgot it.
There were some magazines and newspapers in the waiting area that I could have read but the newspapers were old and the magazines really didn't interest me so I spent time thinking.
On Tuesday we took on a client who wants us to build quite a large website for them and it's presenting something of a challenge. Not only is the website quite large but it's also very complex and the trick is to pick up visitors to the site who could be looking for a number of different things and guide them through the site ... giving them information along the way ... and leaving them with no other option other than to do one of two things. They can either fill in a form or pick up the phone and call.
Now while the result that we want when someone visits the site is quite simple actually getting them to the point where the result is almost inevitable is going to be quite difficult and the navigation for the site will be quite complex.
Of course we could use dropdown menus for the navigation but not everyone who will be visiting the site may find a dropdown menu easy to use. Others who are going to be visiting the site may be quite familiar with dropdown menus but they may not find them easy to use because they may be hitting the site using devices that can't cope with dropdowns.
So how to overcome those problems has been something that has been bothering us for a few days ... but not any more. In the quiet of the waiting area at the tire dealer I had plenty of time to think about how to overcome the problem ... and I did.
Now, instead of putting off the design of the site for another day, we can jump right into it because the navigation problems have been solved.
At the same time I was able to do some thinking about a couple of design elements that we were going to have to incorporate into the site ... elements that were going to be competing for space with text that will be important for both the search engines and the people who may want to buy what our client is selling.
Once again ... thanks to that time at the tire dealer's and just a little time spent doing nothing but thinking ... the solution to the potential problem of how to incorporate those elements without taking too much away from the text has been overcome.
So how much time do you spend thinking? Do you actually spend any time thinking or when you hit a snag do you just push on and hope that you can wing it?
Sadly the world is littered with the wreckage of people's dreams who didn't want to think a problem through but just pushed on hoping that they could wing their way through to success. If you want to be another piece of wreckage then go right ahead and be busy all day, every day, and have not time to think.
But if you want to succeed in whatever you've set out to achieve then spend some time along the way doing nothing but thinking. That will be far more productive than all the time you'll spend being too busy to stop and think.