On Having Enough Socks⁠↗

you are procrastinating or being akratic or falling into perfectionism (closely related to procrastination), by deliberately overcomplicating something or trying to use fancy or shiny new techniques, which of course frequently lead to new subgoals because you aren’t familiar with them yet.

Was there some entirely different strategy which seemed too expensive compared to your current path (which has actually turned out to be far more costly than predicted) and now looks cheap? Or are there any intermediate middle steps which are expensive but cut out a large number of other steps? Or perhaps all the paths are so costly that the top-level goal now no longer looks worth bothering with and you should drop all the existing tasks & stop shaving the yak entirely.

So it’s good to periodically ask, if you aren’t making progress on a problem of intrinsic interest to you, “so all this work, what’s it for anyway? If I were starting over from scratch—knowing what I do now—is this really how I would approach this problem?”