skip to main content

A few years ago my bedroom ceiling fan started making a quiet but metronomic creaking noise. After a few futile nights of trying to ignore it, I turned the fan off so I could get some sleep.

Every night after that was filled with restless, fan-less sleep. I'd wake up groggily each morning thinking, "I really need to fix this." But then I'd start getting ready for the day and my ADHD brain would make me forget.

On the rare occasion that I did remember while awake, I'd starting thinking about everything I had to do (watch videos about fixing fans? maybe replace it? in that case, choose a replacement fan, find an electrician, make phone calls, schedule stuff...) and then ADHD paralysis would set in.

So the fan stayed off, making my life just a little worse every single day. For months.

Finally I'd had enough, and out of frustration I hopped up onto bed so I could reach the fan and just poked it really hard.

And the creaking stopped.

And it stayed stopped.

Months of restless sleep and low-level stress, thinking about how much time and money was going to be required to fix the damn thing, and all I had to do was take 10 seconds to poke the fan.

Lesson Learned

Now whenever some task or project looms large and seems like it'd be just too big to deal with, I try to remember to Poke the Fan.

Do the initial research. Create a quick prototype. Read the docs. Try a band-aid solution. Poke the thing to see what happens!

Sometimes the end result is that it's still a big deal, but I've been surprised by how often I discover that that seemingly-mountainous task was no big deal at all.

At my studio we make use of this idea constantly. It's now how we refer to the first, low-cost step of deciding what to do ("this might be a bad idea, go poke the fan real quick"). And it's how we break out of arguments about just how big of a task something is when it's mostly unknowns ("I think this will be too costly, but let me go poke the fan").

It serves as a nice reminder that there might be an easy way forward, and that we can always invest a little time into exploring a path, before we decide that it's all or nothing.