Nearly everyone has had the experience of being confronted with a problem in either our personal or professional lives where we’ve needed to devise a solution. Your first instinct is often close to the truth, particularly when the problem is in an arena that you are familiar with. The key lies in the first steps you take to refine the solution: will you solve the problem or lead yourself down the solution spiral?

When we propose a solution to a problem, particularly in a group setting, humans have the tendency to get attached to that solution. As people try to help refine the proposed solution and question it we have a tendency to get defensive and force changes to your idea to plug the holes that other people are trying to poke in your idea.

Image credit xkcd

The key is being able to step back and look over the situation. Find the simple solution. Look at what you want to solve, and see if there’s a way to solve the problem quickly and easily. If you need to get from Vancouver to Los Angeles there’s many routes you can take. The best choice isn’t likely to travel by way of Boston.

The lesson: Find the solution that most closely resembles the solution you’re trying to solve.

Thanks to the FOG for this invaluable lesson.

Twitter has snapped up the IP behind a couple of popular Web 2.0 services.  I Want Sandy and Stikkit were both acquired by Twitter a few weeks ago.  The services were originally scheduled to go offline last week, but this window has been extended until the end of business (17:00 PT) this Friday, December 19th.

Check out the original post over on the AGP blog.

Time will tell…

The new feature provides a simple task list that can be activated using the labs menu.  To activate this, click on the green beaker at the top of the screen.

The task list in and of itself is basic, and provides a point that Google can use to extend its functionality in the future… features like integration with Google Calendar (yea, they left that out) and the ability to collaborate & share tasks through Gmail.

While this won’t likely satiate the desires of the Getting-Things-Done crowd, it’s a decent to-do list for keeping track of a non-complex list of items.  The most functional advantage that this has over desktop-based task solutions like Outlook is the ability for it to be accessed anywhere you can hit-up your Gmail.

Overall I’m a big fan of Google’s “Labs” concept. Pre-releasing new functionality in an opt-in manner is the hallmark of open-source and the web 2.0 community, and is a principle that the search giant seems to have embraced wholeheartedly.  Here’s hoping we see more useful features coming out of Mountain View.