Chess Boards and the Full Picture

There was a thing at my old job where my teammates would light-heartedly compete by solving chess.com’s daily puzzles. Back then, I used to do the puzzles on my laptop screen, sitting properly. That provided me a vantage point to see the entire board and calmly assess the situation. Now that I’m working from home, though, I am now sometimes slightly hunched over and I stare at the board on a 32 inch display.

What strikes me as odd is that despite me not being any worse, I am more likely to miss vital details of the puzzle. After looking at the candlestick chart of my puzzle rankings, I’ve come to notice that on days I’m at the university, when I’m doing the puzzles in-between study sessions on a smaller screen, I usually tend to solve 4/5 or more of the puzzles daily, while at home, I usually average at around 3/5. Then this morning, I caught myself slightly hunched over, looking at small parts of the screen, one-by-one, instead of taking a seat back and digesting the entire situation.

As a tech worker, I couldn’t help but draw parallels between how focusing on minor details could deter you from seeing the whole perspective, and that sometimes taking a seat back and calmly thinking it through is often vital, and when we’re in the thick of things, we tend to forget to do that. It is all too common for us techies to obsess over the details instead of the entire product, and while from a QA perspective that is vital, the occasional bird’s eye view should have its place. In fact, that’s what I’ve been trying to apply to my work for a while now, but realized that I had forgotten to apply it to what quite literally required it: chess.

That’s the end of the shower thought, aptly named because I did start the chain of thought in the shower.