It looks to me like “stop thinking and just ship it” is as much of an avoidance strategy as “you can’t ship things until they’re perfect”.
Every once in a while I ask the internet “hey, how do you tell when to release subpar work and when to keep improving?” and no one has ever given me a satisfactory answer. Hopefully I’ll have something for you in a few years.
(I’m interpreting this section as talking about perfectionism, but this interpretation may be rather off.)
The frames on perfectionism which I’ve personally found (occasionally, slightly) useful are:
a) The hits-based approach, where the thing to optimize is not the quality of each individual attempt, but the number and frequency of attempts. E.g. Ben Kuhn’s Searching for outliers.
b) The perspective that focusing on analytical thinking, rather than doing, is often premature because there’s insufficient data to analyze. E.g. Academian’s Break your habits: be more empirical.
c) The perspective that perfectionism is incomplete without considering the input resources (like time and energy). E.g. this SSC reddit comment:
More than anything else, this shifting of my focus to whether I got a result consistent with the resources I was willing to invest gave me back my internal control. I stopped thinking of my output as “I’ll see how good I am” and started thinking of it as, “I’ll see whether I can succeed at X with under 2 hours of edits” or whatever. If I fail under the first construction I can only hate myself. If I fail under the second one, I always have the option of modifying my algorithm and giving myself 4 hours the next time.
d) As an implementation of c), I began wasting less of my time once I implemented time-tracking (via TogglTrack). What gets measured gets managed, I guess. That’s a trite saying, but I was genuinely surprised at what a difference time-tracking made, for me.
e) To combat specifically my perfectionism & analysis paralysis during online shopping, I found it helpful to combine d) with setting some rough plausible hourly value for my time. The time-is-money tradeoff feels much clearer to me now that I rephrase “I spent Xh to save $Y” as “I spent Xh (worth $Z) to save $Y”.
(I’m interpreting this section as talking about perfectionism, but this interpretation may be rather off.)
The frames on perfectionism which I’ve personally found (occasionally, slightly) useful are:
a) The hits-based approach, where the thing to optimize is not the quality of each individual attempt, but the number and frequency of attempts. E.g. Ben Kuhn’s Searching for outliers.
b) The perspective that focusing on analytical thinking, rather than doing, is often premature because there’s insufficient data to analyze. E.g. Academian’s Break your habits: be more empirical.
c) The perspective that perfectionism is incomplete without considering the input resources (like time and energy). E.g. this SSC reddit comment:
d) As an implementation of c), I began wasting less of my time once I implemented time-tracking (via TogglTrack). What gets measured gets managed, I guess. That’s a trite saying, but I was genuinely surprised at what a difference time-tracking made, for me.
e) To combat specifically my perfectionism & analysis paralysis during online shopping, I found it helpful to combine d) with setting some rough plausible hourly value for my time. The time-is-money tradeoff feels much clearer to me now that I rephrase “I spent Xh to save $Y” as “I spent Xh (worth $Z) to save $Y”.