Roughly a third of helpdesk tickets are resolved by the user before a technician touches them, just by trying three things in order. Doing the three R's first saves you the wait and saves us capacity for the actually-hard problems.
R1: Restart it
The single most underrated step. Power-cycle whatever isn't working. If it's a laptop, full shutdown (Start → Power → Shut down), wait 10 seconds, then turn it back on. Not "restart" — restart preserves the kernel state on Windows fast-startup. A full shutdown clears it.
For network gear: pull the power, count to 30, plug back in. The 30 seconds matters — capacitors hold residual charge.
For a software issue: close the app completely (right-click the taskbar icon → Close window, or End task via Task Manager), then re-open.
R2: Retry on something else
Is it just this machine, or is everyone seeing it? Try the same thing on:
- A colleague's laptop sitting next to you
- Your phone (especially for "the website is down")
- Another browser (Edge if you're on Chrome, or vice versa)
If two machines see the same problem, it's almost never a configuration on your end — it's a server, a network, or a service-wide issue. Note that in the ticket: "Reproduced on my colleague's laptop too" jumps the diagnosis ahead by an hour.
R3: Reproduce — write down the exact steps
The most expensive ticket in IT is the one that goes "sometimes it doesn't work". Before opening a ticket, try to write out a numbered list of exactly what makes the problem happen:
- Open Outlook
- Click any email in the Inbox
- Click Reply
- Outlook freezes for ~20 seconds before the reply window opens
That kind of detail lets the technician hit the same bug on the first attempt, and you skip the back-and-forth.
When to skip the three R's
If something is on fire — literally or metaphorically (production server down, security breach, smoke from a UPS) — don't troubleshoot. Raise a P1 ticket immediately and call the after-hours line if it's outside business hours.