I feel absolutely enthused and dumbfounded with the amazing capacity of the human brain and more specifically, with its ability to process information subconsciously.
On Friday I spent many hours on my laptop, trying to figure out all the different functionalities and features of the new theme I activated for this site. Having absolutely no development experience and very little knowledge of coding, whenever I came across a hurdle, I turned to the theme’s documentation and tutorials. Naturally, the solutions offered were focused on generic problems and did not offer much insight on small tweaks one might need for the absolute personalization of a page. So I experimented, I tried pushing different buttons, selecting different options on the available drop down menus, changing a whole bunch of different things that were practically irrelevant to my actual issue and almost destroying what was working. So, I gave up! I put my laptop to sleep and went out for a beer (or two… ok, three)! 🙂
I had decided that during the entire weekend I wouldn’t touch my laptop. That’s right, no email, no Facebook, no photo editing, no new theme on my website – nada! It was easy. Besides, on Saturday my mind was foggy and my brain dehydrated (I think the popular term for those symptoms is having a hangover) and on Sunday I was too tired from spring cleaning to do anything productive. To be fair, I did manage to get in plenty of sleep during the weekend, so on Monday I’d be able to start fresh!
And that’s how it happened! 🙂 I woke up on Monday morning, refreshed, rested and ready to tackle a new week! I went through my daily routine, took my dog Murgo out for a nice walk, had a quick coffee and returned to my home office to start my workday. I was waiting for my work profile to load on my PC and that’s when it came to me. It was like the memory of a dream, but not like the typical non-sensical dreams I have, more like a subconscious thought. It was related to my website and it actually made sense! I quickly opened my Mac and went directly into the site’s back office. I tried that one, simple step I had seen (or thought of) in my sleep, and… it worked! 😀 It actually worked! I was flabbergasted!
All it took was two days’ rest and my brain was able to process all the information with which I had overloaded it on Friday and offer me the solution I had been desperately searching for. Amazing, don’t you think?
Now you can check out my homepage, although it’s still under construction, it looks a lot better today than it did on Friday night. 😉
If there’s one thing I can take away from this astonishing experience, it’s that we need to give our brains time and rest. I’m not a fan of procrastination, believe me! Working under pressure is ok, because it gets things done. But there’s a limit. We all need to recognize that point of unproductivity when we reach it and just take a step back, sleep on it, let the creative juices flow freely and then come back to work.
Happy Monday!
