Per Wikipedia:
Analysis paralysis (or paralysis by analysis) describes an individual or group process where overanalyzing or overthinking a situation can cause forward motion or decision-making to become “paralyzed”, meaning that no solution or course of action is decided upon within a natural time frame.
I, as many others suppose, have many things I’d like to do in my lifetime. Nonetheless, even though I’ve gotten better at it over the years, I still feel easily overwhelmed by all the things I want to do, the things I feel like I’m supposed to do, and the things I must do. What have been your best ways to tackle this? How do you prioritize and find time for different interests, exercise while still combining it with work and other stuff?
I was taught at some point in my life about “SMART Goals”
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time-Bound
The work we had to do was stupid and tedious, but setting goals according to this scheme has actually positively affected my life
Took a class in college called “college success”, and it was literally a class on just getting your shit together. A lot of the information was stuff that everyone already knows, but having it actually spelled out, defined, and being shown how it positively effects your life was absolutely game changing for me.
SMART was one of the first lessons. I don’t look at the whole acronym for setting goals anymore, but the ones I do focus on are measurable and achievable - it doesn’t do you any good to say, “I want to build my savings up” or “I’m gonna grind hard, take 20 units this semester and graduate a semester early”. You’ll never feel like you’ve built your savings up enough if you don’t have a specific goal in mind, and setting unreasonable goals to “push yourself” will just make you feel like a failure, even if you knew the goal was unattainable (I’ve always hated the “shoot for the moon, if you miss you’ll hit the stars” attitude - I set reasonable goals, and when I achieve them, they are raised. Setting a goal you know you can’t reach is almost always going to demotivate you from ever trying to reach it)
Agreed in every point. I do use just about the whole acronym personally, cause I do struggle a bit with specificity and timeliness in my goals when I don’t.
Especially your last point in the parentheses, a lot of people tell me “you need to be more realistic.”
No I don’t, you just asked for the wrong thing. You asked for my long term plan when what you wanted to know was “where do you wanna be in 6 months.” Long term isn’t 6 months to me, I have a 1000 year plan for my nonprofit. But if you wanna know what I’ve got in store for 6 months from now, then I can tell you that too because I’ve got steps to follow.
Don’t shoot for the moon and hope to end up in the stars. Create a detailed plan to get to get to the moon, and then get to the stars from there