Have you tried not having the problem?

“Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this.”

“Well, don’t do that then.”

I’m writing this post from an airport hotel, which is oddly a novel location for me. I don’t normally stay at airport hotels.

I’m flying over to the USA for work tomorrow.¹ My flight is at 9:30 in the morning, which is a perfectly reasonable time of the morning until you factor in that you need to be at the airport two hours before that, and travel time to the airport is highly variable, and… etc. So all told, I was planning to leave the house at 5:30 tomorrow morning. I’m not very good at moving quickly in the mornings, so that means getting up at 4:30.

This is, I feel confident in saying, a less than reasonable time of the morning. When I mentioned this plan to Dave he said “Ah, so you’re leaving Sunday night.” and, well, he’s got a point.

I’d already optimised it as far as I could go - e.g. I was taking a taxi to the airport rather than public transport. Maybe that taxi could have picked me up half an hour later, but the travel time to Heathrow is so variable that I’d have been trading that half hour of sleep for a high chance of significant anxiety.

Anyway, you know the punchline already: that was a stupid plan and now I’m staying at a perfectly adequate² hotel tonight and will have a relatively relaxed short walk to my flight in the morning.

The prompt for this was a call with dad earlier when we were talking about the plan and he mentioned that this is what they did on their last flight and it made such a difference for them. As soon as he suggested it, I realised that it was so obviously a better idea that I changed my plans accordingly.

The funny thing is, it’s not really even more expensive. I did in the end get both a cab and the hotel because there’s a tube strike on, but for an unhurried trip in the evening I would have happily taken the extra hour to come here on public transport, and the combined cost of public transport and the hotel is about the same as what I would have paid for the cab.³ I don’t think expense is why I would have ruled it out, it’s more like a greyed out option. It’s a thing people who aren’t like me do, so it didn’t appear on the option list at all,⁴ but as soon as it was suggested it immediately became the obviously best option.⁵

The funny thing is, this isn’t even the first time I’ve had this exact structure of problem resolution this year. I had to have my car MOTed earlier this year, and they asked me to drop it off by 8AM on the day. I am, as you might infer from my grumbling about the airport plan, not a morning person, and I didn’t wanna. It wasn’t nearly as onerous as the airport timing, but it was still going to be annoying.

Then about two days before, I had a thought, called up the mechanic, and said “Hey, would it be possible for me to drop the car off the evening before instead?” “Oh yeah, sure, no problem.” Turns out, many things that seem unpleasant to do in the morning can just be done the evening before.

This will seem like a non sequitur, but bear with me for a moment: One of my favourite books is a book about photocopiers.

Specifically, “Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job” by Julian Orr. It is about Julian Orr’s time studying photocopier repair technicians at Xerox Parc - sitting in on their conversations, following around work, and generally learning what it is like to be a photocopier repair technician.

At some point in the book, he talks about the distinction between solving and dissolving a problem. A problem is dissolved if it is made to go away without solving it - either because the problem “fixed itself” (e.g. you turned the machine off and on again and now it works) or because you no longer care about it (e.g. because you decided that some part is cursed and just replace it without knowing why it’s cursed).

“Solving” the problem in my case is finding the most efficient route to the airport in the morning (take a cab, then make a choice about what cab company to use, when to leave, etc.), but you can also just dissolve the problem by not doing that and going to the airport the night before.

My ha ha only serious catch phrase is “Have you tried solving the problem?”. That’s a solve approach, but you can also try the dissolve approach of “Have you tried arranging things so you don’t have the problem?”

In some sense this distinction is fake of course. “I need to travel to the airport in the morning” was never the problem to solve. The problem to solve is that I need to be on a particular flight tomorrow morning. In that sense, the hotel stay is simply another equally valid solution to the problem.

But in the moment it doesn’t feel that way. You have a specific problem in front of you (getting to the airport in the morning), and stepping back and going “Actually, why am I trying to solve this problem in the first place?” feels like a fundamentally different move. It’s very easy to get tunnel visioned into treating the particular subproblem you’re on as the problem.

It’s definitely a failure mode I’m prone to, and as a result I don’t necessarily have a good solution to this, but I suspect part of it is starting to reflexively notice yourself thinking “This sucks, but I gotta, because…”, looking at that “because” and asking yourself “Actually, do I?”

1. Ahem, excuse me, for “business” tomorrow. Apparently that’s what you’re supposed to say to immigration so they don’t give you a hard time. Though as I am, for my sins, technically an American I’m probably fine either way.

2. A Premier Inn. They’re very mediocre, but they’re very reliably mediocre in exactly the same way each time, and I was less confident in the alternatives.

I probably should have explored a bit more for dinner options than the premier inn restaurant, which I think falls below mediocre, but I really couldn’t be bothered and valued getting back to my hotel for an early night more.

3. Though in the same conversation my dad also recommended the cab service they use, who would have been about the same cost as the hotel, so it would have ended up adding the cost of public transport. This isn’t exactly a large burden though.

4. Though I think in thinking that it’s something people who aren’t like me do I would have been imagining a much fancier hotel than a premier inn…

5. Especially with work footing the bill.