So yesterday I left work pretty frustrated. I found it difficult to get my hands around some .NET project I was working on. Accessing Excel using VSTO from vb.NET is hard, and I don't have the vocabulary yet. The real problem was knowing where to start, but I fumbled around all day yesterday, couldn't sleep last night, and finally got to sleep after some late-night blog-reading.
What I did notice when I came in today was how much clearer everything seemed. I saw this thing on the discovery channel about how sleep is a necessary part of the learning process - that is basically when our brain writes everything down and makes sense of everything from that day. The example on that show they use is soccer playing, but I've noticed it in other things. Another good example was playing Rock Band - stupid I know, but going from Medium to Hard is difficult - real difficult. You can play all day long, but not get anywhere. When you come back the next day, you can notice the progress in your skills! Makes me think we should institute nap time in the corporate world - we could come back all learned and everything!
1 comment:
I'm completely with you on corporate naptime. I can't count how many times during college or my work-at-home days when, after struggling with a difficult problem set or project for a long stretch of time, my brain would start to feel "full" and heavy, and I'd like down for a catnap. When I'd wake up an hour or so later -- BAM! -- everything made sense, and I was off to the races again.
BTW, jumping into .NET programming with VSTO add-ins is no different than learning Rock Band on Medium playing some random hyper-ska song from the 90s, in that you're trying to get yourself acquainted with your environs while simultaneously dealing with a significant amount of difficulty. (Of course, without VSTO, you'd be writing a COM add-in from scratch, which is probably the equivalent of starting your Rock Band career playing "Enter Sandman" on Hard.) MS Office generally is a really cumbersome product to work with, so don't be surprised if it takes you the greater part of a day to do something conceptually trivial.
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