Tools to improve Problem Solving/Critical Thinking/Common Sense?

-Tim Ferriss podcast is awesome
-Ted radio hour is also awesome
-Wall Street Journal
-New York Times

Read The Slight Edge by Olsen. Dedicate yourself to 5-10 pages/day from a good book. Then give yourself time! Don't rush it! I wish you much success on your job and life!

 

A deep study of creativity may be warranted for you as it is intimately intertwined with problem solving of all types. Perhaps because it was my virgin experience I always recommend Michael Michalko's Creative Thinkering (he was an engineer iirc). From there I read at least 8-10 additional books on creativity to get a feel for the current state of play.

To that I added books like Five Elements of Effective Thinking and directed my studies toward meta-cognition from a practical viewpoint. Now I couple it with books on discipline, deliberate practice, motivation, brain chemicals, willpower, habit formation and many other tools that help you achieve life goals (which will also help you solve problems). If you like legends, there is always material by Polya (How to Solve it, etc).

Tell us a bit more about the types of problems you are tackling and it might spark a creative idea or two where we can suggest even more. What part or parts of the problem solving do you have issues with? Do you understand the basic process deeply? How familiar are you with concepts like diffuse and divergent thinking for example?

 

Are you a programmer? If not, I would suggest learning. Since I've started programming more and more, I feel like I've become a lot better at critical thinking.

 

I have been using lumosity. They are 'brain games' that take just a couple of minutes.
Since I started a couple of months ago my scores have improved by 80%. Consistency helps the most. You just do a couple games a few times a week.

While I can't tell you 100% if it has translated noticeably into my everyday life, I have noticed a few small things such as my memory has improved and I can gather observational information from my surroundings better.

There is a free version that lets you do 3 games a day. The premium features that you pay for are pretty excellent and it has a lot of tracking, evaluating and some personalization.

Here is my invite link: http://www.lumosity.com/invite/5Psbp

- It also probably goes without saying that when I am on a successful reboot that my mind is more clear, I am less depressed and I can use my cognitive abilities much more effectively.

 

There is Code Academy, TeamTreehouse, Microsoft Virtual Academy, and my favorite: FreeCodeCamp!

 

I had no coding experience what so ever when I started. I started with trying to learn html/css through TeamTreeHouse, but I feel FreeCodeCamp is just as good and ofcourse free. They are all great come to think of it, with FreeCodeCamp and CodeAcademy being the most accessible.

 

University But honestly, the university just gave me assignments, and then I Googled everything until I could solve them. What I did learn in lectures could still be easily supplemented with online material.

I don't know if Coursera has programming courses, but you could check them out, if you want a more traditional structure. Otherwise any of these other sites would be good I think. The important thing is to keep making programs, keep coming up with new and incrementally more difficult ideas until you are creating really complex software. To start off, I think my first program was a simple calculator in C++.

 

How to be in Imperfectionist might be a good quick read for you as well. Guise's other book, Mini-Habits has been one of the most practically useful books I have read this year. It definitely touches on the topic of how to avoid the trap of letting our ambitions outstrip our talents and starting at micro levels.

I tackle a fair number of larger projects at work and they are often presented to me in absurdly vague and high level language that can be quite the amorphous blob. I tend to break the problem down into many small sub-cases and tackle each sub-case on its own out of pure interest for deeply understanding that one box. I remember well that slow is fast and less is more. Each task I make effectively gets its own separate ticket. Once I have grasped the problem and brainstormed generally, I often don't look at the big 'project sheet', but instead tick off the small cases and eat them one piece at a time at my leisure. Pressure and rushing is the enemy of progress in my view. So many of our problems can be solve in a relaxed state using subconscious thinking and you need to be able to access those channels of information periodically throughout the day.

Five Elements of Effective Thinking will definitely address techniques to handle fear of failure. In fact, fail and fail often is one of the critical elements presented in the text. It is also super important to be brutally honest and go all the way back to square one when you think you might be missing something fundamental.

One of the biggest reasons that employees fail to solve problems at my company is that they are not brutally honest with themselves about what they know and what they don't know. Their ego and pride get in the way of their success and fail to recognize that they haven't mastered the fundamentals. I see powerful and intelligent business professionals wasting valuable time each day because they didn't take the time to master the use of a basic spreadsheet when initially learning. It is very difficult to unlearn bad habits, but it is vitally important to be able to do so and to admit when you are wrong. It is also very common for people to pick and use whatever tool they know how to use to solve a problem, even and especially when it isn't even a reasonable tool to get the job done.

 

I recommend following The Farnam Street blog by Shane Parrish. He often writes about interesting books about problem solving and similar topics, you may find a lot of new resources there.

 

You can learn modern programming techniques on Udemy.

 

Problem solving, critical thinking - all these types of processes relate to skills you develop while playing abstract board games like Chess, Go, etc.

Learn how to play those kinds of games and become immersed in them. All of them have thriving online communities. You will improve your problem-solving and critical thinking skills, as well as incorporate a new hobby into your life that will occupy some of your potential PMO time.

And, they are hell-a-fun!