Sometimes I have a problem and it has to do with that age old “if you only have a hammer everything will look like a nail” situation.
My problem is that I have a way of spending far more time trying to find a “quick” technological solution to a problem instead of just doing it by hand.
One example is from years ago. I was working at the bank and I was trying to do some sort of calculation in Excel. I had to go through somewhere like 300 rows to come up with a total value. I tried for an hour or two to come up with a formula that would solve the problem.
Eventually I gave up on it – I just couldn’t figure it out.
So my buddy Steve looked at it. He’s far less technical than I am. Within a half hour or forty five minutes he’d finished the calculations, doing them all manually without trying to figure out a fancy formula.
Despite knowing about this trap, I still fall into it every now and again. And each time I remember that story.