How to Prevent “Analysis Paralysis” from Interfering with Your Moneymaking Dreams

Scott Fox in his book called “Inter­net Riches” men­tions a term called “analy­sis paral­y­sis” that has affected me for years and pre­vented me from real­iz­ing my dreams of mak­ing addi­tional streams of income.  What is “analy­sis paral­y­sis”?  It is over ana­lyz­ing what needs to be done to do some­thing but never exe­cut­ing to make it hap­pen.  More specif­i­cally, I have:

• Col­lected infor­ma­tion about how to make money from books, web­sites, and other resources to be used at a later date when I would actu­ally launch my business.
• Spent a lot of effort to acquire an MBA with an eBusi­ness empha­sis in 2002 so that I could sup­ple­ment my com­puter sci­ence skills with a broader under­stand­ing of how to do busi­ness on the World Wide Web.
• Learned how to build Web sites, build­ing and main­tain­ing them for much of my career.
• Reserved a Domain Name and sub­scribed to an Inter­net Ser­vice Provider (ISP)
• Scrib­bled notes of how oth­ers were mak­ing money
• Jot­ted down ideas from the books I have read
• Used Deli­cious to com­pile a large num­ber of book­marks apro­pos to busi­ness that I would use SOMEDAY

That “SOMEDAY” never seemed to happen!

Why?  Because of Analy­sis Paralysis!

Part of the rea­son why you can get stuck in analy­sis paral­y­sis is because we are all so busy with our jobs, com­mut­ing, fam­ily mat­ters, etc. that there is not a lot of time sit down and really imple­ment the ideas and plans we have gath­ered over the years.  You think, when I get time off, you will finally launch those busi­ness ideas that have been rat­tling around the brain for years.

Trust me – it will never hap­pen that way!

But how do you break free of Analy­sis Paralysis?

The best way I have found to break free is to start doing lit­tle prac­ti­cal tasks every day and don’t worry that what you have done is not per­fect.  Here is my thought process of break­ing free of analy­sis paralysis:

1. Instead of hoard­ing infor­ma­tion, I will share it on a daily basis.
2. What is the eas­i­est way to share infor­ma­tion on a daily basis?  With a blog.
3. How do I build a blog?
4. There are many choices: Blog­ger, Type­pad, Wordpress.com, and Wordpress.org…
5. I chose to use Wordpress.org because of its flex­i­bil­ity and it allowed me to use the domain name and ISP I had already cho­sen and paid for.
6. If I post one arti­cle per day on my blog, I can accom­plish my goal of doing some­thing prac­ti­cal on a daily basis.
7. My goal is to be able to write an arti­cle in one hour or less.  Do that by jot­ting arti­cle ideas down in MS Out­look, day plan­ner, etc. so that the ideas can be more eas­ily brought together into a cohe­sive arti­cle at the end of the day.
8. The nice thing about post­ing arti­cles is that it is like teach­ing – you learn by teach­ing oth­ers how to do things.
9. As I teach and learn new things at the same time, I will be able to develop new ideas for prod­ucts that I can later mar­ket.  For exam­ple, per­haps I can pro­duce e-Books from some of the arti­cles I post every day.
10. If I post at least 6 arti­cles per week, I will have 312 arti­cles in a year (6 X 52).  Since every­one says that “con­tent is king”, that will enable my site to have a lot of con­tent with­out spend­ing too much time on it per day.
11. In addi­tion to writ­ing one arti­cle a day, I want to daily tweak the way my blog looks/works.  Here are examples:
    1. Adding a cus­tom header.  If it doesn’t look good, keep work­ing on it tomor­row until you are sat­is­fied with it.
    2. Allow read­ers to sub­scribe to an RSS feed of my posts.  If it doesn’t func­tion cor­rectly today, work on it tomor­row and the next day until it does.
    3. Add search capa­bil­ity.  Please see my arti­cle about this.  You can make it fancier as the days go by.
    4. Add Adsense ads.  If they don’t work, don’t worry, there always tomorrow…
    5. Add Affil­i­ate links. I also dis­cuss this in a pre­vi­ous arti­cle.  Keep adding more with each pass­ing day.
    6. Try some­thing new, fig­ure out how it works, and then share it with oth­ers.  This adds to your over­all knowl­edge and value to the web community.
12. Stay focused on the topic you’ve cho­sen (such as “mak­ing money online”) and don’t stray to other ideas and tan­gents.  Don’t get caught up in tech­nol­ogy, but use it to accom­plish your focused goal.

The above steps have really helped me break free of the paral­y­sis.  You don’t have to fol­low my path, but I do believe you have to think in terms of doing small amounts of work daily to accom­plish your over­all goal.

Isn’t this true in life?  Con­cert pianists had to prac­tice a lit­tle each day to play Mozart’s sym­phonies.  Weightlifters have to work­out a lit­tle each day – with a bit more weight than the day before — to lift the aston­ish­ing loads they do.

It has helped me to silence that nag­ging voice inside that con­stantly said: “why aren’t you doing more to accom­plish your goals?”  I think it will help you, too.

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