Analysis Paralysis: Setting Goals at Work is Key to Moving Forward

My interns are all wrapping up this week, and this summer's crop of students was incredibly creative, thinking up new ideas for how my organization could use social media and improve our web presence. By the last couple of weeks, I started to get the sense that they were getting discouraged.

They had many MANY ideas and suggestions, but I was always a barrier to their moving forward. While they wanted to implement, I was still caught up with trying to answer the philosophical questions about whether we should devote the time and resources to this new idea in lieu of another effort.

It seemed to them like I was suffering from analysis paralysis.

OK, to some extent I was.

Whenever I got caught turning ideas and questions over and over in my mind, I got trapped in analysis paralysis because I forgot the most important thing:

Start with your goals and make decisions based on whether new ideas help advance you towards them. 

Here's a quick little plan for how to avoid analysis paralysis by making the shift toward goals-based decision making:

1. Commit your goals to paper—What do you want to achieve? 

My organization already has a 4-year plan in place (which I wrote on behalf of the communications program) that sets up our goals for the short-ish-term future. 

2. Identify what success looks like—How will you know when you've achieved your goal?

Within our 4-year plan, we have specific outcomes. The idea is, if we achieve these outcomes, we've made progress toward our goal.

3. Evaluate new ideas — Does this new idea help you reach your goal and achieve outcomes?

This is where things get a little tricky. Just because a new idea moves you toward your goal doesn't mean that it's worth jumping on that new idea. The new idea might not really be better than something already in progress, or it might actually be too ambitious to take on. Here are some questions to ask yourself when you're evaluating whether you should move forward on a new idea.

• Does this new idea help you reach your goal and achieve your outcomes? 
• What kind of resources and time will this idea require?
• What trade-off must be made to make this new idea come to life? (In other words, what do you have to give up to move forward on this new idea?)
• Is now the right time to launch this new idea?