Don't Let Perfect Cripple You. Get Stuff Done With These 3 Tips. Analysis paralysis can be overcome. You just have to work on crossing the finish line.
By Adam Toren
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As an entrepreneur, you want to put your best foot forward in every aspect of your life and business. While perfect is great, completed is often a very agreeable alternative.
Entrepreneurs often get hyper focused on details that prevent them from moving their idea, project or business forward. This isn't an argument for poor quality work or half-assed efforts, but too many times entrepreneurs seek to make something perfect and get lost in analysis paralysis. Don't let perfection get the better of you!
Related: 4 Bulletproof Productivity Secrets Gleaned From the World's Great Achievers
Here are three ways to help overcome analysis paralysis to actually get stuff done.
1. Ask yourself about the action. To-do lists are a great way to organize a big project into actionable items and achieve the end goal. However, sometimes they become an excuse for not finishing things. The list gets longer and longer and you feel overwhelmed just looking at it, so you do nothing or you add more tasks without taking action to get things off of it. Don't let your to-do list become your master!
Maybe your efforts could be better, but perhaps those improvements and ideas could go into the next iteration of your product instead of holding you back from pushing forward. Do what you can with what you have right now. Value the list, but more than anything value the action that crosses things off it.
Related: A Bad Decision is Better Than No Decision At All
2. Stick to deadlines. Entrepreneurs, especially when starting out, will often make their deadlines set in sand, instead of stone. You have to hold yourself accountable for deadlines and project milestones. It's easy if you have developed the proper discipline to not cut yourself some slack, then some more and then even more until your deadline is more like a speed bump.
Having a hard deadline and sticking to it makes you accountable for taking action on a specific task by a certain time. Look back at your last month of tasks. How many had deadlines? How many of those deadlines were actually made by you or by the team? You all have to be accountable to deadlines and while there are exceptions, don't make hitting your deadlines the real anomaly.
3. Embrace the nausea. It's common when you are about to take a really big action to get that lovely feeling like you might at any moment be sick. When you're doing really great things, it's normal to feel nervous. Actions that stretch you out of your comfort zone are easy to back out of or to overanalyze out of protection.
When you're about to hit send on that epic email proposal, picking up the phone to call that first investor or hitting publish on your website -- those moments are supposed to make you feel uncomfortable. That's where the magic happens. Don't back out!
Your stomach leaps like you've just stepped out of the side of a plane to jump, and you hope your chute will deploy. Trust your training -- make the leap!
