Overthinking, we’ve all done it, second guessing ourselves, reading far too much into our interactions with others, wondering if that terse email means that the sender is busy or that they’re trying to tell you something else
But there’s the flipside, you notice that a page load is slow when a certain condition is fulfilled, the database always falls over after about 18 hours, something appears to be random but there’s a niggling thing you can’t shake and you look deeper, you see that if the customer came from a certain site, their ads served caused slowness in the page, or that 18.2 hours is 2^16 seconds, so something is overflowing.
But how do you stop overthinking? How do you recognise when it’s not useful and stop shaving that yak?
For me I find that a good idea is to go pomodoro, focus on your task for the allotted time and when you hit a point where you’re diverging from what your goal should be, you make a note of it for later and then carry on with a more focussed path. Then after you finish your session, pick up your notes and work from there. A little distance from the problem can really help add perspective.
Sadly my last foray into pomodoro led to me writing a little application to do the timing for me! But I only did that after the session had finished, so at least there was that.
If you want to talk to me about this, you can reach me here on Github or on Twitter @Testing_crafty