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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern Subscriber

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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?

Latest comments (22)

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itsmonikaa1 profile image
itsmonikaa1

I try to busy myself in Cheap Essay Writing UK the irony of spending too much time reading content about how to avoid wasting time.

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sebastiandg7 profile image
Sebastián Duque G

"... But I have infinite scroll enabled". Man, you made my night.

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simme profile image
Simme • Edited

At one of my previous assignments a colleague and I kept a list of things we wanted to rabbit-hole titled "rackare" (which is swedish for rascal), and every time we stumbled upon such a part of the application, we'd just add it tot he bottom of the list.

every week or two, we'd set aside a day where we just rabbit holed all day. Knowing that we'd eventually get to it really helped in resisting the temptation to go for it at once.

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weswedding profile image
Weston Wedding • Edited

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.

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swarupkm profile image
Swarup Kumar Mahapatra

Seek for help. No shame in doing that

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jwp profile image
JWP

Stick to the work board. Create new tasks to track unexpected things. Pray that your due dates take the extras into account. If they don't stop the deep dive. Pick it up later.

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Scott Simontis

I watch the people around me. When several people in the room are playing with their phones or we have devolved into multiple conversations I will politely point out what is going on to everyone on the room and ask whoever our stakeholder is what they would like us to refocus on, optimally after a fifteen to thirty minute break for everyone to decompress and refocus.

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nestedsoftware profile image
Nested Software • Edited

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.

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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.

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