Anyone else here suffer from analysis paralysis?

Today I had the day off and planned to work on a few projects I have in mind. Going over the projects in the back of my mind at the beginning of the day, I had it all planned out. However, upon opening up my laptop, I found myself focusing on stuff that ultimately didn’t matter. Some examples included:

• This theme works, but I should find a better one
• This image works for this blog post, but I should find a better one
• Researching topics that were 10 steps beyond the one I had planned to working on today.

Focusing on the wrong things and narrowing the scope down to minor details is causing me to not get what I needed to get done completed.

However, at the end of the day, we’re the only ones we can blame in this industry. That’s one of the things I love about IM.

I took about a 10 minute break and found myself thinking clearly. However, this issue is far too common in my daily routines. I’ve gotta learn how to shut my brain off and just get shit done.

I know im not the only one who suffers from this, but I just wanted to make a rant about it. If only I would stop thinking about the “what-ifs” and take more action, I’d be much more successful in my IM career. My intuition tells me that this is much more common amongst our fellow IMers here.

Anyone else have experience with this?

You just gotta replace it with a better philosophy. Being a perfectionist is really counter productive. I adopted a new philosophy of "I can start doing something once I know at least 70% what I'm doing - the other 30% I'll learn along the way". That helped with getting started in new ventures. I tend to apply that to quality as well. If it's 70% perfect then it's OK. I like to go for about 85%. The other day I was looking for a theme for a PBN site... spent about 30 minutes doing so and dropped $18 as I needed something of higher quality than I could produce myself and it needs to stands up to manual review. I just defined a few criteria like 'has to have blog page, image gallery, video gallery, about us page' and as soon as I found one wli was at least 85% happy with I bought it and got to work on some content. I could have spent a lot longer and kept on looking and looking but in the end it hurts your ROI to do so. You can make ur money back you can't replace your time.

Make a To Do List last thing in the evening to be completed the following day, in the morning make it a routine to go through the list and tick things off as you complete them.
I use a notepad but there are several great apps to use too.
https://en.todoist.com/
https://www.wunderlist.com/
https://www.rememberthemilk.com/
https://trello.com/
https://www.toodledo.com/
https://www.any.do/anydo/
https://todo.ly/
If you are really bad at procrastinating then look for some Free Time Management/Productivity Courses

I am just like you and with that kind of feeling will lead to something like...you think you're doing but you're not doing anything actually.
So I made an excel sheet of what I should do each day in a routine.
The reason behind this excel sheet is to track how much I really work VS what i've really work on each day.
And the outcome is I only work 30% of what I thought I have worked for the day... kind of sick..
But it should get better now hopefully.

Make a to-do list and stick to it. Solves all of your problems. I use a piece of real paper for the list and I write down all my random thoughts in Todoist.

Asif WILSON Khan said:

Make a To Do List last thing in the evening to be completed the following day, in the morning make it a routine to go through the list and tick things off as you complete them.
I use a notepad but there are several great apps to use too.
https://en.todoist.com/
https://www.wunderlist.com/
https://www.rememberthemilk.com/
https://trello.com/
https://www.toodledo.com/
https://www.any.do/anydo/
https://todo.ly/
If you are really bad at procrastinating then look for some Free Time Management/Productivity Courses

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why'd you mention all those? now op is going to spend a few days analyzing all the pro's and con's of each to do list app.

I do and it sucks, sometimes i try a method and it works and i have problems to scale it up because i'm afraid of failing, like i made an instagram account last week followed people for like 2 or 3 hours and after 80 follows back i got a conversion, $1.73 not much but i thought "maybe if i had x10 or x100 accounts i could make atleast $50 but then again i start thinking about the vps and tools cost and i start struggling

Nomophobic said:

I do and it sucks, sometimes i try a method and it works and i have problems to scale it up because i'm afraid of failing, like i made an instagram account last week followed people for like 2 or 3 hours and after 80 follows back i got a conversion, $1.73 not much but i thought "maybe if i had x10 or x100 accounts i could make atleast $50 but then again i start thinking about the vps and tools cost and i start struggling

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here's my tip. do as much as you can manually at the start to bring in revenue. whether its one account or three. don't overwhelm yourself.
once you get the ball rolling, scaling up won't be hard because you'll already have made money from it to afford investing in the method.
find out how much a tool you want costs. once you make enough income manually to get it, get it. don't think "man I need $400 for these tools" until you've made that made that much from the method, or are comfortable spending it. it's silly imo to invest like that when you're just starting a method making $2 a day. making $20 a day from it? sure you'll make it back in under a month and your revenue should scale up pretty quick.

Cripes. Thanks so much for taking the time to put in your input guys. This truly is an awesome community.

I'll definitely try this out starting tonight. I'll create a "To-Do" list and stick to it.

I consider myself a master procrastinator, so hopefully this will help a little. additionally, I'll try and look for a free resources regarding time management or procrastination.

Nomophobic said:

I do and it sucks, sometimes i try a method and it works and i have problems to scale it up because i'm afraid of failing, like i made an instagram account last week followed people for like 2 or 3 hours and after 80 follows back i got a conversion, $1.73 not much but i thought "maybe if i had x10 or x100 accounts i could make atleast $50 but then again i start thinking about the vps and tools cost and i start struggling

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Oh i can relate to this. This is spot on.

I think i look at the cost to financially scale up and it kills me. Being a broke college student, its a pain in the ass staying above water. I have the opportunity to scale up, but im limited by the cashflow. Really hoping I can snag a couple side-gigs to fund my "Scaling Up". As they say, it takes money to make money.

@PureHustle I trully understand you, Have you ever done the MBTI test? is a personality test, for example I'm an INFP. People with my personality are bad doers, we mainly dream, or imagine creative ways to solve problems but we suck when actions are required. I'm also very perfectionist because INFP are very idealistic person: "the perfect tool, the perfect situation, the perfect girl". We aren't good to stick to plans, I've made hundreads of to-do list, schedules, but at the end all of them ends with dust.

There is one method that works for me, is called "kanban simplified". I hate things like "Finish task B on 8th April" or "Start task C at 8:00 pm", my mind can't work like that. Otherwise, Kanban is very versatile, no times, no dates. Just activities writed on a post-it. The best part is the visual representation, you can see very easily your progress of the day.

Up there with some of the worst mistakes I used to make. Things don't need to be perfect, that guy that said make it 70% perfect was spot-on.

The reason why analysis paralysis in the beginning was really bad was because I didn't have anything to compare it to. So I could just keep making it better, planning it more, etc etc. I didn't know what my benchmark was.

When you actually implement, experiment, and find something that makes MONEY, you then have a benchmark and can scale-scale-scale and efficiently do what you need to do to reach that standard.

But in the beginning, my best advice is super cliche: Just implement things to the best of your ability, see what works/doesn't and scale from there.

Very interesting problems and it is great to point it out.

What you describe is a pleague in France. We are used to get attached to tiny details at school where all that matters / what is valuated is knowledges and in depth theories while concrete skills and efficiency are left behind.
It is a pleague since when you are out of school, you know a lot of things but you don't how to work and you keep idealising / procrastinating about what can be done and that's very counter productive for a company.

This is emphasized by a huge crisis where companies don't have a dime to spend to teach how to work fresh graduated students . (dued widely to atrocious taxes on employement as well and high social benefits that you pay for productivity wise --> 35 hours a week as a legal working duration for an employee, sucks right ? I do that in 3 days.)
Making the situation worse because of the increase of the unemployement rate of highly graduated people.

There is this despise of qualified jobs which you can learn quickly (from 14 years old) and there are a lack of such people since they are pushed to keep going at school without getting any kind of qualification before you are 18. (end of high school from where you can do nothing)

At HostStage, I have hired a lot of internals and young graduated (highly skilled on the paper on topics that would spin your head) and they just don't get things done which as for the most time end up not to be renewed.

Now after that essay prooving as a french dude I too can theorize too much and skipping the point of answering you. (I should prolly publish an amazon ebook to get some coins out of it.)

Anyhow here is what I suggest :

Any.do to keep up on your tasks. (for quick tasks)
Evernote for tasks which has to be divided in subtasks and then migrated to any.do. That will avoid a big task to be pending for months in your any.do since you feel you can't complete in one day.
Get a better idea of what you want. You seem to wander around to get an image and it doesn't satisfy you plainly because you didn't know what you wanted in the first place.
If you had an exact idea for instance a cup of coffee icon for your blog post, you would fetch the best cup of coffee you would be plainly satisfy with.
So basically plan better and twist your mind to focus on what you do.
If you feel like thinking about something else and you are onto something good stop what you are doing, and mark down your ideas, and get back at what you were doing.

Charly The Rabbit said:

@PureHustle I trully understand you, Have you ever done the MBTI test? is a personality test, for example I'm an INFP. People with my personality are bad doers, we mainly dream, or imagine creative ways to solve problems but we suck when actions are required. I'm also very perfectionist because INFP are very idealistic person: "the perfect tool, the perfect situation, the perfect girl". We aren't good to stick to plans, I've made hundreads of to-do list, schedules, but at the end all of them ends with dust.

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The MBTI is very interesting but I would be careful with those MBTI tests though, there is a lot of stereotyping in those MBTI descriptions and the tests are often inaccurate. Learning the cognitive functions will give you much more interesting information. For INFP that is Fi-Ne-Si-Te.