How to Push Past Your Analysis Paralysis | Scott H Young

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.

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.

• 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.

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.