A lot can be said for walking away from a project to clear your mind. When I sit in front of a screen staring at code all day sometimes solutions to some problems seem impossible. But, for reasons I can not explain, as soon as I hit the shower all the solutions to those problems suddenly appear.

It's really quite bizarre. "Of course!" I can be heard yelling as the water splashes over my head.

This unexplainable sudden aquatic epiphany has become very frequent now and it doesn't take a genius to realise that a two minute shower is faster than 15 minutes of trouble shooting. If only we had showers at the office we might finish more projects under budget.

As an experiment I tried listening to the sound of running water - an MP3 I easily found on Google. Unsurprisingly that didn't help me solve my problems any faster so obviously the sound does not play a part, or is only part of the entire equation. Maybe it's the symbolism of the water splashing over my head - as if it were washing away the blockage that is preventing me from thinking further outside the square. Wow, and my parents weren't even hippies.

Anyway it does prove one thing to me at least. Just because you need to solve a problem in your code, it doesn't mean you have to be in front of the code. And I would say the same philosophy is probably true of other occupations.

Happy showering.