The sub-concious mind is far more powerful than the concious. Just keep the idea in your head, and all of a sudden, the best solution will pop out( it might take some time depending on how intuitive your brain is).

The universe will sometimes give you clues...like seeing something on a billboard, which triggers a train of thought. Or you wake up from a dream and say "Of course, it has to be that way". The answer is always what method utilizes the least energy to accomplish the task.

It's almost an universal rule, the lowest energy method is preferred, and in computer realms that means fewer cpu cycles, fewer disk writes, and simpler methods. I usually visualize a problem like this: There is a bunch of information on the left of a barrier, there is a blackbox in the barrier that the information can pass thru to get to the other side, and be in the desired form. The perl program is the "black box". All the studying I do is just to learn the various expert techniques, which reduce cpu cycles and disk writes, yet still let me process the information. At first my methods are crude and brute force, but the more you learn, the more efficient your processing becomes.

So I visualize the problem, get a picture of the "black box" in my sub-concious, then go about meditating on it, picking up the clues which the "event sequences of the world" provide. Eventually an answer appears, which is the best.