I’ve played sports my entire life and I find certain sports for me it’s easier to find that inner calm.  When your head is clear and only exactly what you are about to do matters.  This is always when I’m at my best.  Everything around me slows down, if I’m aiming at something, the target becomes clearer – almost as if I’m pulling the target to me – and there is no way I can miss it.

I wish I could say this statement is true when I’m writing code.  Oftentimes, my mind is racing with needing to get something done and having a thousand more things to do.  At times it can take me a little while before I realize that I’m actual moving slower because my mind isn’t focused.

I’ve found a great technique that I’ve learned by playing golf that helps me focus better!

No this isn’t a typo, nor is it an oxymoron – I consider this a fact.  If you find yourself feeling like you have to much to do and not enough time to do it, you’ll probably be really stressed.

When you’re this stressed it’s most likely that your mind won’t actually let you focus on the task at hand.  Instead, the only thing your mind will be focusing on is how you have to get “this” done now while not thinking about how you are going to get it done.

Circle back to the title of this article and this is where slowing down comes into place.

This might be a boring refresher for some people; however, I think it’s important from time-to-time to go back and visit the basics.  CSS can provide a lot of power to a web developer (or designer), but when used improperly it can cause a lot of headaches.

When using CSS, like doing on development, it’s important to stop and think about what you are doing and more importantly, what’s the easiest way to accomplish it!

Let’s start with understanding the acronym behind CSS – it stands for Cascading Style Sheets.  Cascading, being the very important word to understand.  This means that the base styles you define will carry throughout (or cascade) all of your design unless a specific style is overridden.

I’m going to begin by demonstrating how I typically begin creating a style sheet.