How to play with your tech problems

When you’re not familiar with a particular technology or software interface and you run into trouble, it’s hard to know whether it’s gone wrong, or you’re doing something wrong. 

It’s a bit like when your car engine starts making a strange noise. The only reason you know it’s strange is because you’ve been driving it for ages, and so you already knew what “normal” sounded like before you started hearing that worrisome wheezing sound.

This is why it’s worth taking the time to practice and play with the device or software you’re using. The more familiar you can get with it, the better sense you’ll have of what is normal, and then you’ll be better equipped to deal with actual problems when they arise.

I said “play”, and I meant it. Play lets us learn by doing, without the weight of consequences or judgment. In a playful state, the brain’s reward systems are active while stress responses are reduced, which encourages curiosity and flexible thinking. That freedom to experiment and fail safely leads to deeper understanding and confidence with tools or ideas we might otherwise find intimidating.

There’s a reason software developers refer to a “sandbox” environment where they can test their work – they need a safe space to muck about, create and destroy, and test their limits. Anyone who’s had me build their website will have seen the work-in-progress filled with friendly animal pictures, as I need placeholders to test with while I wait for the final images to be provided. Work is so much more enjoyable if you’re working with something you enjoy, and can let loose a little bit.*

How can you bring this attitude to a tech toy you’re trying to learn? Give yourself little projects with no consequences for failure, or no way to fail. 

• Make goofy inspirational posters in Photoshop, and see how they come out on that new intimidating printer. 
• Edit together a montage of your dog sleep-barking in DaVinci Resolve. 
• Calculate your dizzying billionaire budget in Excel.
• Automate something useless with Zapier, like emailing yourself a pineapple emoji whenever your favourite team scores. 
• Build your kid a game about fish in Articulate Storyline. 
• Make the same nonsense quote graphic in Canva, PowerPoint, and Figma, and see which tool you like working with best.

Perhaps you’re already familiar with the tech toy in question, but you want to get better at it, and do a deep dive. Rather than using AI to solve your problems when you run into them, you can ask it to MAKE you some problems, so you can practice solving them yourself. 

• Tell AI to give you a task to complete; only ask it for hints if you really get stuck. 
• Ask AI to give you some code with an error, and then try to find the error. (You may also find yourself needing to do this in code that you’ve asked it to write correctly, but that’s a whole other game…)

And if all this still sounds a bit too much, and you’re struggling to find your way around Jira and it’s no fun at all (it’s not), is there some way that you can make it into a game? That could mean giving yourself a reward for succeeding at a task, like a nice piece of chocolate or five minutes on Instagram, whatever it takes to make you feel like you’ve scored a win.

The more you treat technology as something to goof around with rather than master, the less intimidating it becomes. Every small experiment (successful or not) adds to your understanding of “normal”, and that’s the foundation of confidence. You don’t have to be fearless with tech, just a little more playful – like a kid in a sandbox, making new friends.

*If you work with, say, medical equipment or nuclear reactors, you should probably only play with a simulation, not the real deal.