Excerpt from my contribution to “1 Habit for a Thriving Home Office”. Check it out on Amazon:

https://tinyurl.com/1habitbook

Working from home can be fantastic when you have your space and plenty of time to do your work. Being alone can be a very creative time. You’ll start thinking about what you need to do and how to do it, make an outline, and start capturing some notes. Left undisturbed, you’ll think a little more about how great that project will be. And isn’t nice to be alone in a comfortable place where you can really think about producing your very best work?

Stop it.

When working from home, we need to be even more aware of human nature and our tendencies to over-think an idea or project. Working alone, we miss the collaboration and social aspect of brainstorming that helps us understand when to move on. We can get bogged down in planning and analysis. “Analysis paralysis” is a real danger.

A great way to counter this tendency towards over-thinking and over-planning is to purposely work quickly and iteratively on purpose. This means placing a much higher value on finishing a project than making everything perfect first. Set a short amount of time for planning (“timeboxing”), honor that limit, and then move into action, execute on your plan, and launch your project.

A while back, much of the software industry moved to an “Agile” methodology, which prioritizes releasing usable software quickly over perfect software released at some later date. The core tenet is that finishing a project and putting it into action or making it available is the only way to get feedback on what works and what needs further refinement.

This works well because most of what we do is a work in progress. If a project or initiative is important, we’ll understand how and where to improve only AFTER moving into action.

The doing/publishing/launching/going live is the action that allows for the data and feedback we can use for further improvement.

Working iteratively in this way recognizes that causes and conditions will change, solutions will change, and the opportunity itself will change and evolve. In other words, that opportunity with a new client may look very different a month later when you finally get your slide deck perfected.