My Dad’s “RTFM” Rule Is the Best Thing He Ever Taught Me

My dad isn’t necessarily a “get your hands dirty and figure it out” kind of person (unless it had something to do with information security and technology). When I was growing up, we didn’t do any woodworking or home improvement projects — although we once built an amateur radio, aka a HAM radio, not that I knew what that was at the time. Regardless, my dad has always given me the best advice that’s helped me handle everything from basic household management (like his “circle” method) to home projects, big or small. 

One such rule he instilled in me early on was to always read the f***ing manual, aka the “RTFM” rule for short. This applies to putting together storage furniture, using a new cleaning product, or even embarking on a project of any sort in your home. It’s always so important to refer to the “manual” because most of the time, the answer is available to you if you go and look for it instead of assuming incompetence or blazing ahead without knowing the goal. Ultimately, my dad wanted us, instead of getting overwhelmed by the enormity of the finished project, to start at step one and continue on from there.

There are different ways to use the RTFM rule. Recently, I assembled a new storage bench and knew to look at the manual first before even trying to set things up. This ultimately saves time and streamlines the process. (How many times have you decided to “wing it” and ditch the instructions only to need to go back to the manual later?) This applies to cleaning, too, since your manual is to read the directions of your appliances, tools, and products to efficiently use them the first time instead of just applying them haphazardly.

This also applies to things that don’t have a physical manual, like organizing the garage. Your first step would be to organize information or the steps of said project to make it more manageable — aka creating your own manual. Another example of how I’ve applied the RTFM rule to projects that don’t have a physical manual is that I like to do research on different “methods” for organizing and applying them step-by-step like I would a manual. 

In my household, several people are neurodivergent, so we can get overwhelmed with clutter and lose things. I found a cleaning method that worked for all of us, which has made it easier to streamline the process of keeping the house in order. In some ways, understanding the way my and my kids’ minds work is kind of like reading the manual on our own brains. Not sure that’s what my dad meant by RTFM, but I’ve applied it. 

My dad’s insistence that my family RTFM instead of relying on someone else to do the project for us or work blindly meant we learned “how things work,” and, once we paid attention to the steps, could solve many of our problems on our own.