Sudoku Strategy

In our perpetual busy lives how many of us sit down and do something we really love to do. I realised that when I was a stay at home mom I did something that both my daughter and I were passionate about. After we got my son to nap in the afternoon we enjoyed hours of jigsaw.She loves to do it with me and I just love to do jigsaws to clear my head . It helps me focus on something besides "what can I make for dinner?"
I think hobbies meant a great deal to all of us growing up and in today's busy lifestyle I think we don't have time to keep up with what we love to do the most. Its ironical how sometimes we are lost in our office meetings and we forget to have lunch . We all work for a living for three most important things food ,shelter and clothing.In today's corporate world we are so high strung with our careers we don't have to time to decide to what to wear,skip meals and never be home. There seems to be something technically wrong here, don't you think?
All we need to do sometimes is to just slow down and do something besides working. I found an interesting way to enjoy my breaks. It was tough in the beginning may be because my puzzle solving days were long gone and I had lost the touch of lateral thinking.I enjoy doing it during breaks I take at work.Its like a breath of fresh air.
Its more often than never that I come with solutions to a program I am developing when I am doing the Sudoku.I changes my perspective of thinking and all of a sudden there is a new dimension to the same problem and hence a solution.
To any puzzle solving there is a combination of three processes : strategy,marking up and analysis. If we look into these carefully we could use these three processes to solve any problem in our lives and handling any situation. In any situation the first step is the scanning understanding the problem/situation at the outset. Then when the problem cannot be scanned further we jump to the marking up process where we start thinking logically and finally the analysis where we have already come up with some solution with our process and now finally deciding if that is the right thing to do. Any analysis would have two ways of doing " Elimination " and "What if" . As the name signifies we start analysing the solution using the process of elimination and finally come up with the one and only possible choice. The "What if" strategy is used when we come up with two possible solutions for a problem and we have to make a guess. If we ask the "What if" question to ourselves , in any given situation we can choose which one of the results would be a better fit for us.
I think lateral thinking for problem solving adds a lot of creativity to our lives and also keeps us intellectually stimulated.