“Perfectionism kills schedules; reasonableness saves them” is a quote from Gerald M Weinberg in ‘More Secrets of Consulting‘. I find that this is pretty true from any project, be it personal or professional, be it small or large.
It is always a constant battle to keep people from the decreasing yields of additional analysis, workflow definition etc to keep to the 80% of information that is really needed to take the right decision and move on.
It is possibly the fear to take a decision that drives most of us to be excessively perfectionist in gathering all possible data, when the issue and the possible solution is already visible for a long time. And this problem does not improve in our age of Big Data and possibilities of unending data mining!
Fight perfectionism and excessive analysis. Be reasonable, overcome your fear, and act.
