This technique reminds me of "wishful thinking" in SICP (not sure if it was in the book or the lectures). The tricky parts get delayed but one progresses on the

This technique reminds me of "wishful thinking" in SICP (not sure if it was in the book or the lectures). The tricky parts get delayed but one progresses on the overall structure and the more obvious parts to reduce the mental overhead. It's pretty effective. I think it is best used on "software design" kind of problems. Related things: A book that is very digestible and praised is "How to Solve It" by George Polya (Original: "Schule des Denkens. Vom Lösen mathematischer Probleme"). It has focus on math teaching but many of the principles are generally applicable to problem solving and teaching. A talk I really like is "Hammock Driven Development" by Rich Hickey. Very enjoyable and goes into some of the longer term things we can do around problem solving. Utilizing time and letting the brain work in the background. I just a few weeks ago had to refactor and generalize some hairy part of a web app. I could do it well because I was thinking about the problems over a longer period. In the end I frantically hacked away the solution and now have a nice little extendable library that is quite a bit more useful than what I had before. I even _found_ and _fixed_ some bugs while sleeping - just popped into my mind after waking up at some point.