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How to Push Past Your Analysis Paralysis | Scott H Young
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Analysis paralysis
It happens when you convince yourself you can't go forward with a decision, because you haven't given it enough thought, done enough research or figured things out to get started.
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Why analysis paralysis happens
It has the same root cause as all forms of procrastination. It is caused by the desire to avoid something unpleasant: you don’t want to get started, so you start searching for excuses to justify avoiding the unpleasantness.
And there really are fears, uncertainties or doubts, which make doing more research an attractive excuse.
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Dealing with analysis paralysis
You have to manage 2 realities:
- Rationalization: Deal with your rationalization that you need more time to think, plan and research by preventing this excuse from working.
- Underlying fear: Even if you convince yourself that you are engaging in procrastination and your paralysis is unhelpful, that may not stop you from doing it. Now you need to figure out how to get past it.
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Overcoming Rational Excuses
Spending some time analyzing the possible options is good. But an indefinite amount of time is going to be bad.
The way to get past this is to set constraints. If you set these constraints in advance, then you can undermine the rational part of your mind from using them as a justification for further procrastination.
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Setting Constraints
- Set a decision deadline (for doing all the research and thinking) with a default (when the deadline passes, you’re stuck with the default).
- Start blindly, change later. Give yourself a default, and force yourself to work on it for a certain amount of time, before you can go back to research.
- Leave hard choices open-ended.
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Overcoming Emotional Resistance
You need to remove the anxiety and fear of doing the thing you’re avoiding. Then, you need to remove or invert the pleasant feeling you get from stalling:
- Give yourself small doses of the thing you’re scared of to diminish the fear it generates.
- Punish yourself for failure to act.
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Paradox of Choice
Overthinking lowers your performance
Our working memory is what allows us to focus on the information we need to get things done at the moment we’re doing them. It is also in limited supply. You can think of it like our brain’s computer memory. Once it’s used up, nothing more can fit in.
When you overanalyze a situation, the repetitive thoughts, anxiety, and self-doubt decrease the amount of working memory you have available to complete challenging tasks, causing your productivity to plummet.
Overthinking kills your creativity
A recent Stanford study suggests that over-thinking not only impedes our ability to perform cognitive tasks but keeps us from reaching our creative potential as well.
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Ways to improve your life
There are a few different ways you can go about setting a goal or creating a new habit.
- Target the minimum output. You focus on always doing at least a little bit so t...
When to Focus on the Minimum
Minimum targeting works well for establishing long-term habits.
A goal of, for instance, doing fifty push-ups every day might not be ideal for fitness, but doing something is better than doing nothing.
Another reason to focus on the minimum is that it assumes the difficulty is in starting. To start a process can often be the hardest. Then you want to set a lower threshold to make starting as easy as possible.
When to Target the Average
Focusing on the average makes sense when you're hoping to sustain something, even if it is not always a perfectly easy and consistent output.
It works when you are already putting in a bit of effort, but want to improve that effort over the long-term.
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Taking action = eventual success
Inaction is the biggest cause of our failures and our miseries. If we could consistently do the things we know we should do, we would be more successful, and our lives would be better. Yet w...
Explaining inaction
Some possible but weak reasons why action is hard:
- Talent. But the world is full of brilliant stars that flame out and mediocre minds that build empires.
- Preferences can explain our failure to try, but don't explain our inner struggles with inaction.
- Capacity for effort. If your capacity for doing things is lower, it does not explain chronic bursts of activity with inevitable crashes in your goals and projects.
- Motivation. Some people with the most reason have the hardest time taking action.
Confidence
- Your motivation to complete a task depends on the value of the reward and your expectation of success.
- Your expectation of success depends on your motivation.
If your projects tend to fail, your expectations are low, and motivation fades. If your projects tend to succeed, your expectations go up, and motivation stays strong.