> I think I've spent too much time on learning and also too much time in planning earlier in my career and life. I think it's a blind spot if you're an analytical type. It ends up being an excuse to not complete things. There's always something else that you "need to know" that blocks you.
I'm in this text and I don't like it. Jokes aside, I want to do and experiment more but I struggle with analysis paralysis and striving for perfection, often upfront.
I need to move in the direction you did. How did you break out of this pattern? How do you deal with thoughts like "there's a better, cleaner way to do this and if I just analyze I can find it"?
To me, a big part of my mental shift was just realizing how much code or process I follow doesn't actually deliver customer value. I want to make things that affect people or improve lives and the longer I spend polishing what I'm making, the less I'm getting feedback.
I used to work in a large company on a team that essentially developed frameworks for other teams to use. I would often think through designs from several different angles and try to create an API that could work in any scenario. After shipping our frameworks, I often found that the "customer" (i.e. the other team) would use what I made in a different way from what I had expected. That meant a lot of the thinking I poured into the project was unnecessary. I really just had to look at that one particular use case and design for that.
After a while I started working backwards and went directly in the customer team's codebase to start integrating potential API designs to ensure it would work for their use case. That saved a ton of guesswork and eliminated a lot of code waste.
So I guess my advice is to question everything you work on and ask if there's a simpler/cheaper way to build just what you need. I usually aim for creating a proof of concept now to ensure that I only build what I need. It often means hacking things to make it work, and then afterwards clean up the hacks, but to be honest, a lot of hacks are good enough, if they are isolated. Also, try to develop a mindset of always aiming to deliver an output to ensure you don't get bogged down with analysis paralysis.
I will take a stab at this since I am transitioning away from this mindset myself.
Find your highest priority item, break it down, and work on each task, one at a time.
If it’s not critical, let go of control and be okay failure, both from yourself and others.
Since you are also the type who wishes to analyze, dedicate some time once a week for a retrospective (what went well, what didn’t go well, what could have improved) and use those to come up with action items.
Or, if that’s too much, my original advice for you was “just do it.”
I'm in this text and I don't like it. Jokes aside, I want to do and experiment more but I struggle with analysis paralysis and striving for perfection, often upfront.
I need to move in the direction you did. How did you break out of this pattern? How do you deal with thoughts like "there's a better, cleaner way to do this and if I just analyze I can find it"?