Good morning. 👋
Keyboard Cleaning
So here's what happened.
My laptop keyboard was filthy — proper crumbs and fluff everywhere, touchpad too.
I grabbed a cloth and just started wiping it down. Laptop still on, screen still awake. Obviously daft because every wipe was pressing keys, opening random windows, and moving the cursor about. Absolute chaos.
So I thought —
Right.
🤔
I'll just disable the input while I clean it.
Off I went to search "how to disable keyboard on Windows 11".
The Hunt
Turns out Windows 11 does let us disable the keyboard and touchpad separately —
- Device Manager for the keyboard,
- a toggle in Settings for the touchpad.
Great.
And here's the bit that actually made me laugh — if I disable the touchpad first, I've just lost the only way of clicking around to do anything else. No cursor, no way out of the menu. I'd need an external mouse plugged in just to navigate your way out of the mess I've made. Very comical. But then again, I could start from disabling the keyboard. Either scenario must be done sequentially. Mm.
Well. I wanted both off at once, one clean sweep, and that's not something Windows does natively. You know, being lazy is the first trigger to become efficient. Ly lazier. Very captivating. Moving on.
For that I need a third-party app, something like KeyFreeze.
I mean, I just wanted to clean the input surface.
So there I was, genuinely considering downloading software.
The Realisation
And then it hit me — BY THUNDER! — I didn't need to disable anything.
The whole goal was clean the keyboard, NOT "disable the keyboard while staring at a live screen and using said keyboard to do it".
Ten minutes of Device Manager and third-party app hunting, solved by a button I'd been ignoring the entire time.
Other Times This Happens
It's not just me, either. Everyone's done the "phone's dying, where's a charger" hunt — rummaging through bags and drawers — while the laptop sat right there could've charged it via USB the whole time.
Or the scissors.
Packet won't open, scissors are nowhere to be found, and instead of grabbing the kitchen knife sat right there on the counter, the whole house gets dragged into it.
Bob! Where are the scissors? — Shouting starts. And when we can't find the scissors, another problem occurs. Blaming happens. Shouting continues even further. And the packet just sits there, completely unbothered. The kitchen knife — I'm right here.
The Actual Point
This is apparently called functional fixedness ⬅️ our brain grabs the first solution it recognises and won't leave that "room", even when there's a door standing wide open right next to it.
⬆️ The OVERRIDE is to STOP and ASK what we're actually trying to achieve BEFORE chasing the first idea that pops up.
Not "how do I disable the keyboard" but "how do I clean it without breaking anything".
Once we're asking the right question, the answer tends to show up fast.
Mine was a power button. Sat there the whole time.
Why We're Wired This Way
This functional fixedness. Very natural.
None of this is a personal failing, mind — it's taught into us, practically from the cot.
Think about school — we're rarely asked:
Here's the goal, work out your own path.
Instead, we're given a method and told to apply it.
Sums are done this way.
Essays are structured that way.
Even washing our hands gets taught as a fixed sequence, step one through to step five, rather than "the goal is clean hands, sort it however you like".
And there's a proper reason for that — teaching the goal alone and letting each child discover their own route would take absolute ages.
Thirty kids, thirty different paths, thirty times the time!
Far quicker to say —
Here's the proven method — FOLLOW IT — right, next lesson!
— and move the whole class along together.
Repeat that enough times across a childhood, and the brain stops treating it as "a" method — it starts treating it as "the" method.
By the time we're an adult, that pathway has worn in proper deep — like a path across a field that's been walked so often the grass won't grow back.
The brain does NOT fancy re-deriving the goal from scratch every time a problem turns up, so it shortcuts straight to whatever solution's sat there, ready and familiar. Sensible, most days — efficient, even.
It's just that the shortcut occasionally leads us straight PAST the actual door — like that bit of mine, hunting down software to disable a keyboard I could've simply switched off.
So it's less "silly mistake" and more "brain doing exactly what it was trained to do — just in a situation where the training didn't quite fit".
Until Next Time
And therefore, there's nothing to be fixed here.
It's not broken, it's working as intended. But we may override that default mechanism. We're not repairing the mechanism, we're consciously interrupting it.
So step back, and ask what we're actually after, before charging off down the first path the brain hands us.
The real answer tends to show up on its own.
👋
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