How do you avoid rabbit holes?

It's nice to go deep on a problem sometimes, but we can be tempted to go too deep. How do you manage your time when examining intricate problems?

Comments

[AndyRosenberg]

Timebox yourself. At work I drudge through 10y/o legacy code, so I get into this situation from time to time. Typically I’ll give myself x amount of time to look at a problem from one angle before stepping back to think of any other solutions.

[Saurabh Sharma]

Actually this way is used to prevent systems from infinite loop, in many domain specific languages

[Andrew Brown 🇨🇦]

Yep, timeboxing is the best

[Hamish Macpherson]

Came here to say this! Such a great technique.

[Zane Milakovic]

I don’t.... next thing I know several hours went by and I missed the whole point. 20 years into this industry and I fall into the same trap. Mostly because I enjoy the fall.

[Navee]

1. Timebox.
2. If you are stuck into a problem for more than 3/4 hrs, time to roll back your chair and go for a fresh air. OR, sleep.
3. Explain the problem to other colleagues. This helps most of the time for self realisation of the solution.

[shroomlife 🍄]

Let's go down every rabbit hole you find as long as you learn or have fun! Stop feeling bad about times you may see as wasted. They are there for a reason. Accept, Analyze and Awake. Go further! If you ask me, you can never go deep enough. When you reach the bottom you can crack it up and a new rabbit hole rises. This is, I suppose, how knowledge is being created down here.

[Keith 20]

I agree with the sentiment but say there are only so many hours in a week - at some point, I think you have to look at what you're focusing on critically and decide whether or not it's worth it to go into a topic further.

[Mike]

It's been about 11 years since I started writing code professionally, and I'm not sure I'm capable of avoiding rabbit holes.

Whether it's web, desktop apps, databases, or game dev, I just can't help but over analyze. The products always turn out great because of it, but often much later than planned.

Tasks at my real job still gets done on time, mostly, since my rabbit holing largely occurs on my side projects. That knowledge then gets applied to future iterations of the work at my job.

Maybe that's the key for me: do the boring thing first for jobs that are time sensitive and important. Then allow myself to deep dive topics since I enjoy it, and mix the new stuff in as appropriate?

[Asim Shamim]

I fall into rabbit holes when I start a project, I begin to make problems for myself because I’m hesitant to move truly forward

The only way I pull myself out is asking: how relevant is this to solving my current problem?

It can be nerve wracking to progress so I think I distract myself but digging deep into irrelevance

[Weston Wedding]

I almost always grab a coworker and do a "sanity check" with them to see if I'm about to go too deep. I explain the issue, I explain what I'm about to potentially invest time in, and see what they think.

But this habit only developed after learning to recognize when maybe my dive was about to be too deep, or that my perfectionism was starting to get in the way of forward progress.

[Nested Software]

Do you feel comfortable that you can proceed in your work without needing to understand further details? If so, then it’s probably okay to climb out of the rabbit hole for now!

When learning something new, I try to go more in-depth with basic/fundamental cases, and then I’m often willing to accept more sophisticated extensions as variations on a theme.

[Jonesey712]

I am currently dealing with this. Working on making a login piece work that I took from another project. It kinda works, but in adapting it to this project I'm running into many problems getting to work correctly. I finally just commented out that piece (it's a required login page) so I could move on to other parts.
I try to give a good amount of effort in finding a solution. Since it my person project I try to stick to a day or 2 before I move on.

[Adam Crockett 🌀]

I did timebox a recent exploration of a thing, and by 12pm I decided that I had found a 3rd party lib that did exactly what I could have wrote. I called time and set to work integrating it. Unfortunately it came to home time and I could have used another hour, be careful what you plan!