What to do when I'm stuck in analysis paralysis?



Here a few tips I usually give to people who have done so much research that they don't know what to do with it:

  1. Ideate and prototype in 3 hours: Take an hour to list 10 to 50 ideas that come out of what you learned. And then take 2 hours to transform 3 of these ideas in prototypes with just paper, a pen, sticky notes, tape and scisors. 
  2. Make progressive summaries: it can be hard to summarize what is the key thing you learned. So try to summarize maybe all what you learned in 50 learnings. Then summarize those in 30, 20, 10, 5, 3, 2 and 1. You get the idea. Then find out what level of summary is the right one. 
  3. Write a briefing from a client: Imagine a client comes to you and gives you a problem to solve. Write the email of the client with the problem, the time frame, the budget, etc. This will help you work on the problem where all what you have learned will help.
  4. Imagine the end result: imagine, you are 1 year from now. What's the end result of your project? What's the form it takes? Now prototype this today.
  5. Outsource: ask a friend to join you, share with him all what you have learned and ask him to summarize the one important thing that he took out of what you said. Now work on just this.

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