How I Stopped Overthinking Last Week

5 steps that help me stop overthinking.

I was overthinking if I should have skipped writing this week. It has been a busy week, so I had kinda decided to not write but I remained indecisive. So, today’s newsletter is a bit different. It is a story about what I did to stop overthinking last week.

I have always been an over-thinker. They happened for various reasons, for examples

• When I have to decide between difficult choices

• When I am nervous about a not-so-great outcome, I tend to overanalyze the repercussions.

• I worry about what people would think if I fail.

5 Steps I took to fight my overthinking last week.

These are roughly the same steps I take to stop overthinking at work. So, it should apply to your varied scenarios as well.

📝 1. Write it down

I wrote the pros/cons of skipping my article this week.

Pros

• I wouldn’t sacrifice quality family & me time.

Cons

• Breaking my streak of publishing every week felt scary.

• I thought, what if missing a week would be the beginning of missing more weeks?

Next, I dug one level deeper into the pros/cons and questioned if they were accurate.

Reasons

• How much time to write an article?

  • I spent 4-6 fragmented hours across the week.

  • Why so much? Can I do something in half the time?

• Why is it bad to miss the week?

  • I have already been running my newsletter for over 6 months. So, it is already a habit, and skipping a week won’t make it go away.

⏳ 2. Put a Deadline

I challenged myself to do it in under 2 hours.

On a regular week, I took some time to pick my topic from a large pool of topics that I have built over time.

This time when I did step 1, I realized the topic had to be about overthinking!

Wrote down two possible outcomes:

1. If I finish in 2 hours:

   1. I will publish it this week. Hurray! This happened.

2. If I don’t

   1. I will publish it the week after and say how I made a decision and stuck to it 🙂

So, it was a win-win.

🧘‍♂️ 3. Contiguous Attention

For something as cerebral as writing articles, I need focused time. During regular weeks, I squeezed in newsletter writing in any small time window I could spare. (some as little as a 10-minutes).

So, I context-switched a lot and lost my ‘flow’. This had many negative effects. Examples,

• I would flip-flop between 2-3 topics between my writing sessions.

• Left a lot of the difficult parts for the end.

For this one, I decided to have no more than 3 sessions.

• Session 1 - 1 hour. Writing the outline + the first draft.

• Session 2 - 30 mins. Rewrite bad parts with fresh eyes. Create images two images.

• Session 3 - 30 mins. Final proofread with tweaks.

The actual outcome was pretty close to what I decided.

✂️ 4. Keep a check on Perfectionism

Perfectionism feeds overthinking! So, I had to be cautious about not going down the rabbit hole of perfection.

For my newsletter writing, I have built a good sense of what is good enough vs very good. However, I struggle with very good vs over-perfecting. The bar for this article was to get it to the good enough threshold. If I hit that in 2 hours then I publish else I delay it by a week.

It can be hard to understand what good enough means when new to something. In those cases, getting early feedback helps you calibrate yourself. For example, if this were a design proposal for a complex topic then I would share it with a few stakeholders for early feedback.

🔝 5. Prioritize

I love the cliche, prioritize ruthlessly. When time is limited, you have to be judicious with it to focus on what generates the most value.

For this one, I reminded myself of my P0s and P1s.

• P0 - Must do.

  • The core message and the value to the reader are obvious.

    • In this case: Core message = The steps I took to stop overthinking and that you can replicate it to fight your overthinking.

  • The article is easy to read.

  • Good hook & clear takeaway.

• P1 - Nice to have.

  • Stronger hook.

  • Highly actionable tips that cover various scenarios.

    • In this case: Sharing a software engineer example that most of you could relate to.

  • Images with a metaphor. They make the readers go aahaa!

  • Tweaking SEO.

Parting Note

Overthinking is not always bad. If I overthink something then it means I care about it. Of course, as long as I catch my overthinking in time and act upon it.

To all you over-thinkers out there, I hope this article shared actionable tips. If not, the goal was just to be good enough this week.

TL;DR

Follow these 5 steps to stop overthinking

1. Write down your thoughts and give them a structure. Eg: pros/cons

2. Put a deadline if you choose to act on it. Also, write down the possible outcomes and stick to them.

3. Spend bigger but limited chunks of time. Small and too many chunks make overthinking worse.

4. Aim for good enough and seek early feedback if you aren’t sure.

5. Prioritize ruthlessly if you are in a time crunch, and get your P0s done.

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Hit the ❤️ button if the article was good enough 🙂

PS: I spent a total of 2 hours and 20 minutes including scheduling it on Substack.