Analysis paralysis; It's effect on productivity

byWealthsGate

86 followers

Updated 4 years ago

Delaying action while over-analyzing information does not in any way help, when the issue of accomplishment is brought to the floor. In fact, a survey showed that, by and large, workers spend the greater part of their workdays accepting and overseeing data as opposed to utilizing it to carry out their responsibilities! Research has shown that analysis paralysis take a greater toll on your well being, than just having a lost time.

Overthinking can affect you in the following ways:

• It kills your productivity: While over thinking prevents us from performing our cognitive demands, it does more, by hindering us from exploring our creative abilities. Compare your self with someone who just gets an idea, plans his way through, steps out into action, and keeps on planning as he gets to meet new challenges on his journey of execution. certainly the learning curve will not be the same for both of you. The one who is making progress, will learn and make new discoveries that will help him/her in handling future challenges or even add to his benefit in his present pursue. I am actually thinking of analyzing on the move rather than staying in the analysis phase where you do nothing, other than just stay paralyzed on your current position.
• It decreases your output when it comes to mentally challenging duty:
  Quoting Psychologist Sian Beilock and Thomas Carr; it's “a short-term memory system that maintains, in an active state, a limited amount of information with immediate relevance to the task at hand while preventing distractions from the environment and irrelevant thoughts…If the ability of working memory to maintain task focus is disrupted, performance may suffer.” Why do you think computers have hard disk and RAM, the hard disk keeps the information for long, the will lose the memory after you have shut down the computer. But which of these do you think of does the task of thinking on the go? Does this give you an idea of one reason we have high output when it comes to task performed by our computers. I advise you to expand your RAM rather than over-analyzing. Someone said "the more participants want to perform well on a task, the more their performance suffers." Think about it. During the process of over analyzing, there is a repetitive thought process, self-doubt and worry that weighs down the amount of working memory available to you to perform your current task. Again back to the computer, It's like sending multiple commands, especially repetitive commands to your computer, do you notice the delay it sometimes causes?
• Over analyzing murders your creativity;

“In a study, participants were put in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine with a nonmagnetic tablet and told to draw a series of pictures based on action words (for example, vote, exhaust, salute) with 30 seconds for each word. (They also drew a zigzag line to establish baseline brain function for the task of drawing.) The participants later ranked each word picture based on its difficulty to draw. The tablet transmitted the drawings to researchers at the d.school who scored them on a 5-point scale of creativity, and researchers at the School of Medicine analyzed the fMRI scans for brain activity patterns.

The results were surprising: the prefrontal cortex, traditionally associated with thinking, was most active for the drawings the participants ranked as most difficult; the cerebellum [the part of the brain traditionally associated with movement] was most active for the drawings the participants scored highest on for creativity. Essentially, the less the participants thought about what they were drawing, the more creative their drawings were.” The above is a work of Grace Hawthorne, a professor at Stanford University Institute of Design, who teamed up with behavioral scientist Allan Reiss to find a way to scientifically measure creativity using brain imaging:

• You end up being unhappy with yourself: We make decisions differently, their are those who make decisions once their criteria is met, whereas their are those who want to make the best possible decision. They have to examine every possible option available to them. Do you not thinking that the second group of persons are sometimes responding to the fear factor? Thinking of what will happen if or if not? In a study, it was found that those who took decision once their criteria was met, that is the first group, reported a higher life of self-satisfaction, confidence, optimism, less regret and less depression.

It is true that we could get the best result when we analyze situations, but over analyzing, in my opinion, may not bring the best in us. We might actually be paralyzed by our fear of "what will happen if this is done, or not done" Please as you read this, feel free to give me your thoughts in the comment section. Thank you.