So many times we get sucked into a rabbit whole when fixing/troubleshooting things we forget to take a break. More often than not this leads to the “not seeing the trees through the forest” syndrome as my grandfather used to call it.
Sadly this happens to me more than I like to admit. I am tenacious when it comes to problem solving and I don’t like to “give up”. However, once I hit that mentality of “I’m not going to let this problem beat me” is when I most need to take a break.
I have found that if I quit focusing on the problem at hand and do something else, often times not work related, for a few hours when I come back to the issue I solve it within 10-15 minutes.
Case in point, just yesterday I was troubleshooting a Power BI Data Gateway issue. We had the Gateway installed and configured. The Power BI Service could see and communicate with it so we were all set to create our first data source.
We entered in all our information about the data source and when we clicked the Add button, it came back with a failure. It was a very generic error that didn’t really tell us anything. I searched the Power BI Community forums only to find that we had done everything correctly. I was stumped, but I started down the path of “I’m not going to let this problem beat me!” Right then is when I should have put it down and walked away. But no, I kept doing the same things over and over again expecting a different result (and we all know what that leads to – CRAZY town).
I was forced to take a break and go coach my swim team of 6-12 year old kids. I completely forgot about the problem for 2 hours while I coached and talked with my kids. When I got home and sat down at my desk, I had an epiphany. Check the Gateway logs! Wow, why didn’t I think of that before?! I discovered that the gateway had gotten itself into a bad state so I restarted the gateway service and was able to successfully create the data source using the data gateway. That took less than ten minutes, sheesh. If only I’d been forced to coach swim team earlier.
So the next time you encounter a problem and just can’t seem to figure it out, take a break. Give your brain something else to focus on and you just may save yourself from a trip to CRAZY town.