I have noticed in myself I tend to overthink or deliberate on some things for too long. Why do I feel like it’s way too long? Because I know upon reflection that this choice or consideration won’t matter to me in the long run, lets say in 5-10 years, or sometimes even tomorrow. These choices that bother me in the moment are about as important as the difference between buying different brands of toothpaste, the brand doesn’t matter but making a choice to buy toothpaste does.

One such felt frustration I have had before was picking a programming language when I wanted to improve at programming. Being more of a novice at one point you might (as I did) spend a lot of time listening to advice about some edge case optimization or opinion piece, all because you want to make sure not to invest time in the wrong tool for the job, but in the end the important learning comes more from actually applying the tool on problems.

I think that is why when you spent real thinking effort to analyze a question that pops up, these choices that are actually somewhat arbitrary sometimes will leave you carrying a felt frustration, that can be hard to trace afterwards. The energy spent simply is not in parity with the importance of the decision, and that mismatch drains your cognitive battery and kills momentum. You can spend a lot of time and still feel stuck, with no clear reason why.

This leads us to the concept of satisficing which is one mental lens we can try to apply to constrain ourselves from being overwhelmed by choices and get moving. The term was coined by Herbert Simon and is a blend of satisfy and suffice, describing a decision-making strategy that aims for a “good enough” or satisfactory outcome rather than the absolute perfect or optimal one. Looking back to my own example earlier, the more useful question in hindsight is not “which language is the best to invest more time in?” rather “what problems energize me that I want to solve, and can I solve them with X?”. The last one is also closer to any type of action from me. Which if you want to create momentum for yourself, is a good heuristic to have.

A practical test when you feel stuck is to ask whether your current question has a natural next step attached to it. If it does not, it is probably the wrong question. Satisficing is easier once you are asking something actionable.