Have you ever been stuck in a situation where you’ve spent countless hours digging through lot of options, overthinking their pros/cons and having a tough time to decide?
If yes, I’ve been in the same boat myself and the more I think about this, I think it’s causing some serious issues in my productivity. Since I’ve started to self host a lot of services, I’m overthinking and overanalysing the software choices available to do a certain task. For eg, a personal wiki, sounds such a simple and common use case but I’ve personally tried countless choices. I’ve read and searched for these discussions on lobster/HN/Reddit discussions boards and that has been a real time sink for me, now that I look back. I’ll try an option for maybe a week or two at best and then jump on to something else in search of the perfect solution.
It’s hard for me to stick to a solution. And it’s even more embarassing when you tell your friends about the “latest new distro” you’re using, announce it to the world on Twitter and when someone asks, “hey how’s that OS working for you” after a month, you tell them “Oh, I switched from it last week”. I’m not making any of this up, I’ve been in these shoes myself and honestly it’s not a good feeling.
In the search of perfect I tend to lose sight of things that are important. Things which are slow, boring but they work are more reliable than a software which changes fast and breaks often. I want to fail cheap and quickly rather than spending a lot of time and still eventually failing.
No, this post doesn’t have any answers on how to fix this problem. Well, if I myself knew then I’d not be writing this but giving a TEDx talk on it. These are just my observations and something that I intend to actively fix.
Boring is better. I want to stick to stable choices when it comes to trivial things in life. I don’t wanna seek excitement or joy from switching to a cool new distro. Instead, by actually doing some important project at my work or building my side projects, something that gives me a genuine feeling of happiness. After all grass always seems to look greener on the other side.
I don’t usually pen down my thoughts like these, but I want to refer to this public post as a reminder for myself the next time I’m about to make the same mistake.
Fin.
UPDATE (2021-11-02): There’s a really nice video I came across today on the same subject. I’d highly recommend you to give this a listen if you found the above post relatable.