Was That a Productive Rabbit Hole, or Did I Just Lose Two Days?

Last weekend, I spent two days building a lakeside cinema.

An interesting decision, considering I was supposed to be designing a client intake process for my business.

Which raises a question.

How the hell do you know whether you're following a productive rabbit hole or just finding a spectacularly elaborate way to avoid doing something important?

Because I genuinely don't know.

And apparently, I'm still investigating.

It started with Ghostbusters.

Last weekend, I was thinking about how much fun I'd had in Lia's theatre on Rippily. We'd watched Ghostbusters, played some silly games afterwards and generally had a wonderful time blowing off stress.

Just people hanging out, laughing and enjoying themselves.

Which got me thinking about the Dopamine Diner in TechAlchemy Village, how people gather, and how much fun it would be to have somewhere we could watch movies together.

And just like that, my brain announced that the Village needed a cinema.

Did it, though?

Nobody had complained about the lack of cinematic entertainment. There wasn't a petition circulating through the Village demanding better movie facilities.

But apparently, we needed one.

So I built it.

Not just a screen and some chairs, either. A proper Lakeside Cinema with a view that plays a little trick on your eyes. At first, it looks like a small pool of water between you and the screen. Then you realise you're looking out over an actual lake.

I think it's cool.

Naturally, I had to customise everything for Practical Magic, one of my favourite movies from the '90s.

Magical margaritas. Enchanted snacks that replenish themselves. Broom parking.

At one point, I was figuring out how to make a frog cough up a ring.

I wish I were making that up.

Two days. Gone.

And now I've spent several paragraphs telling you about my cinema instead of getting to the point of this article.

SEE WHAT I MEAN?

Meanwhile, back in the real world...

I had actual business work to do.

I'm developing an intake process for clients who want me to design and build Rippily spaces for them.

And it's not just a questionnaire asking whether they prefer blue or green and if they'd like a nice sofa by the window.

I need to understand what they want their space to accomplish. Who's going to use it? How should people feel when they arrive? What should they experience?

And how do I discover what they need when they might not even know what to ask for?

Because we all know the problem with not knowing what we don't know.

You don't bloody know it.

It's easy to get so buried in designing something that you lose sight of the people you're designing it for.

And here's what occurred to me.

When I was in Lia's theatre, I wasn't analysing the space. I wasn't thinking about how she'd designed it or what decisions she'd made along the way.

I was simply enjoying the experience.

I was the person the experience had been created for.

I was so busy trying to figure out how to design an experience for other people that I almost forgot what it felt like to be the person having the experience.

Maybe I needed that reminder.

Maybe being on the receiving end of something wonderful helped me reconnect with why I enjoy building these spaces in the first place.

Or maybe figuring out how to make a frog cough up jewellery was infinitely more entertaining than tackling the difficult bits of my intake process.

Maybe both.

Either way, I finished the intake process later on Sunday.

End of rabbit hole, right?

Not even close.

And then Monday happened.

The intake process I'd built is a webpage where prospective clients can tell me about the spaces they want me to create.

But then I thought, wouldn't it be useful if their answers automatically became a nicely formatted Google Doc we could both access later?

Of course it would.

So I built that.

Then I thought, wouldn't it be even better to have everything in a dashboard? Their answers, reference images, and all the information I'll need when we sit down together to discuss their project?

And I may or may not have built a WordPress plugin to make that happen.

Okay. I built the plugin.

Apparently, creating an entire client management workflow seemed like a reasonable follow-up to spending the weekend building a magical cinema.

But here's the thing.

This rabbit hole was directly related to the work I needed to do.

I wasn't avoiding the intake process anymore. I was creating a way to keep everything together so I could spend my energy understanding my clients instead of hunting through documents and trying to remember where the hell I put their reference images.

And there's a reason that's important to me.

I've learned, the hard way, that complicated systems have a nasty habit of becoming another job.

What seems perfectly logical when I'm excited and firing on all cylinders can become an incomprehensible mess when I come back on a low-energy day.

So I was trying to build something that would make the work easier to return to, not just easier to organise.

Did I go overboard?

Possibly.

Did I build something that might make my business easier to run?

I think so.

Will I know for sure until I've used it with actual clients?

Nope.

And that's what makes this whole rabbit hole business so bloody complicated.

Sometimes we wander away from the work. Sometimes we wander straight into a better way of doing it.

And sometimes we build something so elaborate that we'll need another system to remember how to use the first one.

Been there, too.

So when does curiosity become procrastination?

I've followed plenty of rabbit holes that led absolutely nowhere.

Others have turned into some of my favourite creations or taught me things I never would have discovered if I'd stuck to the plan.

The problem is they feel pretty much the same while you're in them.

It's not as though there's a sign halfway down the tunnel saying:

CONGRATULATIONS! PRODUCTIVE RABBIT HOLE. CARRY ON.

Or:

TURN BACK, YOU IDIOT. YOU HAVE WORK TO DO.

Which, frankly, would be a useful feature.

With ADHD, getting completely absorbed in something interesting can make it especially difficult to notice when an afternoon has disappeared.

And I don't necessarily want to stop that from happening.

I love creating things. I love following an idea just to see where it goes.

But I also want to build a successful business, and sometimes those two things pull me in very different directions.

I don't want to spend all my time creating wonderful things only to discover I've neglected the work that makes it possible to keep creating them.

So how do I protect my curiosity without handing it the keys to my entire schedule?

My three-question rabbit hole test

I've been turning this over in my head, and I think I've come up with something worth trying.

Not another elaborate productivity system. Good Lord, the last thing I need is to go down a rabbit hole building a system to manage my rabbit holes.

Just three questions.

1. What am I getting out of this?

Am I learning something? Creating something? Solving a problem? Connecting with people?

Or am I simply having fun?

Because not everything has to be productive to be worthwhile.

The cinema was fun. It also gave the Village another gathering place.

The intake dashboard was different. I was trying to solve a practical problem in my business.

Both gave me something, just not the same thing.

And sometimes enjoyment is reason enough.

But if I'm calling something a business improvement, I should probably find out whether it actually improves anything.

2. What is this rabbit hole costing me?

Ah, the uncomfortable question.

Even when we're doing something worthwhile, we're choosing not to do something else.

The cinema took time away from my intake process.

Did I need a break, or was I avoiding something difficult?

Possibly both.

And now my shiny WordPress plugin introduces another consideration.

Will it save me hours of paperwork, or become another thing I have to maintain?

A rabbit hole can be worthwhile and still be badly timed. And a clever solution can create more work than the problem it was supposed to solve.

That's worth remembering before I add another seventeen features just because I can.

3. What's enough for now?

Oh, this one's a bugger.

The cinema needed a screen.

Then a lake.

Then magical details.

Then apparently the frog needed an advanced digestive system.

The intake process needed a form.

Then a webpage.

Then a Google Doc.

Then a WordPress plugin.

Then a dashboard.

Noticing a pattern?

There's always one more thing I could add, improve or experiment with.

But am I adding something because it solves a problem, or because I've thought of another interesting thing I could build?

Those aren't always the same thing.

At some point, I need to stop building the system and actually use the bloody thing.

Otherwise, I've created an impressive collection of tools for running a business I'm too busy organising to run.

And here's something else I've learned the hard way.

When I stop, I need to leave myself a way back.

Nothing complicated. Just a little note telling me two things:

• What did I do?
• What's next?

That's it.

Because the version of me who comes back to a project on a low-energy day may have absolutely no idea what the wildly enthusiastic version of me was thinking.

And I don't want to spend the first two hours reconstructing yesterday's brilliant ideas before I can do anything useful.

I've learned to keep things as simple as possible and leave myself breadcrumbs.

Not because I can't handle complicated things. Clearly, I can make them plenty complicated all by myself.

But because I know how frustrating it is to build something wonderful and then struggle to find my way back into it.

Maybe that's the real test for my new intake dashboard.

Not how many clever things it can do, but whether I can open it when my brain is running on fumes and know exactly where to begin.

The goal isn't necessarily to climb out of the rabbit hole. It's to notice that I'm in one, decide whether I want to stay, and leave myself a trail if I decide to come back later.

So, were my rabbit holes worth it?

The cinema? I think so.

It gives people another place to gather, laugh and share an experience. That's a big part of why I'm creating TechAlchemy Village.

The intake system?

I suspect it'll be useful. But the real test will come when clients start using it.

Will I spend less time managing paperwork and more time understanding the people I'm working with?

Will everything be easy to find, even on the days when my brain has apparently decided to take the afternoon off?

Or have I created a magnificent administrative monster?

Time will tell.

And perhaps that's something I need to accept.

I won't always know whether a rabbit hole was worthwhile while I'm still in it.

Sometimes the answer only becomes clear afterwards.

So here's what I'm going to try.

When I notice myself disappearing down another rabbit hole, I'll ask:

1. What am I getting out of this?
2. What is it costing me?
3. What's enough for now?

And when I decide to stop, I'll leave myself those two little breadcrumbs:

What I did. What's next.

That's my entire plan.

No complicated tracking system. No colour-coded charts. No seventeen-step process requiring a tutorial and a subscription.

Just three questions and a way back.

Because I don't want to lose the curiosity that makes me want to create things.

I just want to make sure I'm leaving enough time and energy to enjoy what I've created, work with the people I'm creating it for, and actually run the business.

Will it work?

I haven't a clue.

But it seems worth trying.

And speaking of knowing when to stop, we've now spent a rather impressive amount of time rewriting an article about knowing when to stop following rabbit holes.

The irony is not lost on me.

At least we're leaving breadcrumbs.

What about you?

How do you tell when you're exploring something worthwhile versus avoiding something important?

Have you ever followed a ridiculous idea that turned into something wonderful? Or built an elaborate system to make life easier, only to discover you'd created yourself another job?

And do you have a way of finding your place again when the enthusiasm wears off?

Please tell me I'm not alone.

And speaking of rabbit holes...

I'd love to invite you to enjoy Practical Magic with me on Saturday, October 31 at 1 p.m. Eastern in the Lakeside Cinema at TechAlchemy Village.

Come hang out, enjoy a movie and see what two days of questionable time management can produce.

There will be magic, margaritas and, naturally, a frog with a jewellery problem.

At least this time, we can all enjoy the rabbit hole together. 😂