7 Mistakes We All Make When Troubleshooting Our Problems

Clearer troubleshooting of small issues sharpens your thinking for big moments.

Written by Dr Alice Boyes

Have you ever had a facepalm moment when you're troubleshooting a problem, and suddenly a cause or solution you'd overlooked becomes obvious? You sheepishly realize you'd wasted time going down the wrong track.

This happened to me recently. I was working on a coding project, and a small error was driving me batty. I kept asking an AI chatbot to fix my code, but none of the fixes solved it.

Over an hour later, I realized I'd been saving each new version, but I'd forgotten a step needed to make the new versions live. Every new test ran the old code. Once I actually deployed the new code, it worked.

Scenarios like this happen to all of us, but they're not unpredictable. There are common blind spots. Once you understand the patterns, you'll make fewer mistakes.

Below are seven patterns, with examples, and the questions that expose our cognitive errors.

1. We Blame a Recent Change

Example: You've recently updated the operating system on your phone, and the whole UI is different. A favorite app starts running slowly and glitching. You assume the app glitch has been caused by the system update. When you eventually check a subreddit devoted to the app, you learn the glitches are unrelated and can be fixed another way.

How to catch yourself: Consider questions that force observations over assumptions, like:

2. We Overlook a Recent Change

The flipside can happen too. You're tired and have a headache. You mentally run through many possible causes, but only later realize you'd had one less coffee than usual.

How to catch yourself: Consider anything you're doing more or less often or differently.

3. We're Too Vague About a Problem

7 Mistakes We All Make When Troubleshooting Our Problems

You think, "My back hurts." Only when a health care provider starts asking you questions do you realize it only hurts on Tuesdays, after an all-day meeting, when you're slouching all day rather than sitting in your usual ergonomic setup.

How to catch yourself: Be precise and complete in describing your problem. Ask yourself questions to jog insights about potential causes: When did the problem start? Is it constant or intermittent? Is it getting worse, improving, or staying the same? What makes it worse? What makes it better?

Analogies to questions asked in medical settings can be helpful for isolating many issues.

4. We Troubleshoot Behavior, Not the Environment in Which the Problem Occurs

A couple keeps having squabbles about money, chores, scheduling, and parenting. They get some books about communication techniques, but the books don't seem to nail it.

They go to a therapist who asks when the arguments occur. The answer: They're almost always right when they come home from work, before dinner, when they're ravenous and tired.

Their therapist suggests an experiment. Would a snack before leaving work help?

It solves 75 percent of the problem. Not only does the food help, but the trigger of eating the snack reminds them that nitpicking each other isn't what they want.

How to catch yourself: Ask: "Could the problem lie in the environment, not the behavior?"

5. We Don't Try Basic Solutions First

A common bias is considering complexity first. You're having trouble sleeping, but haven't tried the most basic troubleshooting of having a consistent bedtime. You're overeating but haven't tried planning your meals for the week ahead. Or, you struggle with essay writing, but you don't write outlines.

How to catch yourself: Ask: "What's the most boring, obvious thing I haven't tried yet?" Think of it like someone asking: "Have you tried unplugging and replugging it?" But for everything.

6. We Guess Instead of Diagnosing Systematically

I dabble in small coding projects. When code isn't working, I can create debugging logic that logs the results of each step the code completes to isolate which step is failing, but I need to remember to do this.

How to catch yourself: We can often set up tests that rule possible causes in or out. After you've tried one simple guess (like unplugging), move to a more systematic diagnostic process.

7. We Overlook When a Workaround Is Easier Than Solving the Problem

In a recent coding project, I had two different scripts that both operated on the same spreadsheet. One script was locking the sheet and making it so the other script couldn't access the sheet.

As a workaround, I simply copied the part of the spreadsheet that the second script needed to work on to a new spreadsheet. The second script could access that fine. When it was done, I copied the updated version back to the original document. I didn't need to solve the locking problem.

How to catch yourself: Ask "What am I trying to accomplish?" to reveal if a workaround might be faster.

Improving Your Basic Troubleshooting Will Transfer to Higher-Stakes Situations

You may have noticed that many of the troubleshooting blind spots we've covered relate to how we're framing the problem. When we troubleshoot, we attempt to solve our representation of the problem—the story we've told ourselves—rather than the complete facts of the problem itself.

We've seen how specific questions can separate assumptions from observations and reveal what we were missing.

Many examples here involved technology, but the blind spots we have in concrete situations also repeat in broader, less concrete situations. We often make mistakes like trying to change our behavior directly without considering whether changing our environment would work better, or jumping to predictable but wrong conclusions in all sorts of contexts.

When we learn to spot our cognitive errors in the course of low-stakes troubleshooting, we improve our capacity to do it in higher-stakes circumstances. Each time you catch one of these patterns, you're not just solving a problem; you're becoming more skilled in managing your own thinking.