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Overthinking

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Re: Overthinking

#21

Post by roland35 »

When I feel myself approaching overthinking, one strategy I try is to identify if there are different requirements or criteria I may have missed and write them down. A lot of decisions involve complicated trade-offs, and it is often too easy to punch holes in ideas, move on to the next idea, punch holes in that one, and end up back where you started!

By ranking the relative importance of requirements you can at least try to optimize for the most important requirement, and be able to see that other ideas may be better for other requirements but not the most important one!

Re: Overthinking

#22

Post by gnulinux »

Dudeman112 wrote: post #20
gnulinux wrote: post #6

I'm so astonished that we are so careful not to overthink, to the point we accept "you're overthinking it" as a valid excuse to disregard rare risks. But we don't have the same cultural concern against underthinking. I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this". Surely overthinking is bad, but when underthinking can be severely dangerous, it's easy to see why some people ove…

>I overthink everything all the time and there are still many things I miss and do wrong Maybe you are just thinking? It only becomes overthinking when you have been at it for "too long". As in, it is not reasonable to guess that thinking more about it will be of value. Of course, knowing when that is the case is hard. IMO we should spend more time figuring out when it is overthinking than warning people about overth…

I mean I have a clinical problem with overthinking (I am diagnosed with OCD) and I'm not disputing at all there are cases where overthinking is irrational and unproductive. I'm just pointing out that just like there are risks of overthinking, there are also risks of underthinking. And I usually see advises about how to prevent overthinking, and not underthinking. If I were to make a perfectly rational choice, I'd risk overthinking more than the opposite. So, although balance is ideal, if a balance is not possible (you don't have enough data to make a perfect decision) then I think, rationally speaking, you want to err slightly on the side of overthinking.

Re: Overthinking

#23

Post by aminicam »

roland35 wrote: post #21

When I feel myself approaching overthinking, one strategy I try is to identify if there are different requirements or criteria I may have missed and write them down. A lot of decisions involve complicated trade-offs, and it is often too easy to punch holes in ideas, move on to the next idea, punch holes in that one, and end up back where you started! By ranking the relative importance of requirements you can at least…

brilliant

Re: Overthinking

#24

Post by sumtechguy »

mikub wrote: post #4

Thank you, I really liked that post. I'am 40years now and started to teach myself programming 4 years ago. I do a lot of overthinking, like "Linux or Windows", "Should I learn some C before Python? What about all this networking stuff, how does that work?". I know it probably doesn't really matter, because I consider myself still a beginner in programming, but it is sometimes really hard not to feel overwhelmed by al…

I have been doing this for about 28 years now. It is always overwhelming. There is always one bigger tech rabbit hole to run down. My advice, start with 1 small thing you can do. Do not worry if it is right or wrong. Just pick something you can do. Then go from there. Just today I wrote some code I had been putting off because I was overthinking it. I had the code written up in about an hour. I was way overthinking it. I figured just splat something up and go from there. I found I had already worked most of it out.

It is one thing I got out of agile work. Sometimes people just do not know what they want. But they will know what they do not want. That can be a starting place for you to help figure out what they do want. Also many times something is way better than nothing.

Also if you are struggling with python vs C. Start with python. It is easy to splat something up and get something running and see results quickly. C used to be that thing. But it has a bit of a learning curve of 'how to compile a program' first, then learn to program with it. A good skill to have but when starting I would put it lower on the 'things to learn' scale.

That little program I did earlier I could have done in java/C/C++/C#/js/bash/powershell/winbatch/SQL/etc/etc/etc but I picked python as it got me to splat something and get it done. It aint pretty but it gets me the info I was after. 100% throwaway code. My only real nitpick with python is that its ruthless dogmatic approach to spacing. Some consider that a good thing. But at first when you are learning it can be a drawback as you do not understand grouping and scope yet.

Re: Overthinking

#25

Post by 123pie123 »

I get called out by others for overthinking - until the risks I've pointed out become reality

It's all relative - one person can be thought of overthinking and the other person can be thought of as a 'cowboy' and just winging it

Re: Overthinking

#26

Post by andrewksl »

123pie123 wrote: post #25

I get called out by others for overthinking - until the risks I've pointed out become reality It's all relative - one person can be thought of overthinking and the other person can be thought of as a 'cowboy' and just winging it

I guess the difference between an overthinker and having foresight is the rate of false positives?

Re: Overthinking

#27

Post by WJW »

WA wrote: post #8
gnulinux wrote: post #6

I'm so astonished that we are so careful not to overthink, to the point we accept "you're overthinking it" as a valid excuse to disregard rare risks. But we don't have the same cultural concern against underthinking. I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this". Surely overthinking is bad, but when underthinking can be severely dangerous, it's easy to see why some people ove…

- You didn’t think this through - That was a stupid idea - Do you even have a plan? - Do you know what you’re doing? - Darwin awards - … I think there is a lot of cultural concern about not thinking enough.

I was going to post basically this. There are tons of people saying "you are underthinking this", but they almost never use those exact words. (BTW, to the point where my spellchecker flags "underthinking" as a word that does not exist)

Re: Overthinking

#28

Post by cuddlybacon »

gnulinux wrote: post #6

I'm so astonished that we are so careful not to overthink, to the point we accept "you're overthinking it" as a valid excuse to disregard rare risks. But we don't have the same cultural concern against underthinking. I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this". Surely overthinking is bad, but when underthinking can be severely dangerous, it's easy to see why some people ove…

> But we don't have the same cultural concern against underthinking. I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this". Surely overthinking is bad, but when underthinking can be severely dangerous, it's easy to see why some people overthink.

We do this all the time. We just don't use the word "underthink". "You didn't think this through." "It sounds like you haven't gotten to the details yet." "Are you sure that's how it works?" "You need to start thinking things through." "You have a brain. Use it." "Pull your head out your ass." I think all of those phrases are suggesting the same thing underthink would.

Re: Overthinking

#29

Post by WJW »

If I can recommend anything in this area, it would be the book "Art of action" by Stephen Bungay. It examines in quite a lot of detail how the military has "solved" the problem of having to make decisions without perfect information, and how you can improve the structure of your decision-making process when you find you are getting bogged down in process and bureaucracy.

Re: Overthinking

#30

Post by CountDrewku »

There comes a point where you're only thinking and not doing. If your thinking is paralyzing you into taking no action that's "overthinking". Just do something even if it's wrong sometimes.
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