2048 and keeping your eye on the prize

I haven’t written anything in months and months. The reason for that was a crazy summer trip and a move to Nashville, Tenn. where I started working at Cross Point Church as the creative team’s project manager.

In a nutshell, I take projects from just an idea on paper to creation and execution. I work with a lot of details and a lot of people.

When I’m in the midst of assigning to-do’s, talking with four different people about the same task and making sure deadlines are being met, it’s really easy to think about only the every day task. And when that gets stressful and I need a break, there’s a little yellow icon under “Games” on my iPhone.

2048 is one of the simplest games I’ve played in a long time, and it gives me the chance to turn my brain off. Except when it provides a breakthrough about the way I approach things sometimes.

The goal of the game is to create a tile that reads “2048.” You get there by combining two tiles of the same numbers. For example, two “4” tiles are combined to make an “8”, two “8” tiles to make a “16” and so on.

It’s really easy to just combine two’s and four’s until your brain is turned into soup. If you don’t remember the goal of getting to 2048, you’ll end up both losing the game and mindlessly starting again to again no avail.

And in between two fruitless games of 2048 on Sunday night, it hit me. I lost sight of the big picture.

I was worried about two’s and four’s instead of 512’s and 1024’s and eventually a 2048.

It’s really easy for me to get caught up in making sure this person has designed their piece and that person has scheduled an email and another person has given their budget approval. In that, I start to drift away from the goal of a project. The project loses focus and things have to be done twice.

Every time I make a decision about a detail of a project, I need to remember that it falls in context of the bigger picture. The two’s and four’s of my project are important because without them, I’ll never get to 2048. But if I only worry about two’s and four’s, I’ll fill up my board with small pieces that never come together to win.