I commonly make a similar transition that I describe as task orientation versus time orientation.
The transition happens when there is some project where there seems to some number of tasks to do and I expect it to be done (or get that step done, or whatever). This expectation then turns out to be wrong, usually because the steps fail directly or I didn’t have enough information about what needed to be done. Then I will explicitly switch to time orientation, which really just means that I will focus on making whatever progress is possible within the time window, or until complete.
One difference is that my experience isn’t sorted by problem difficulty per se. I mean it correlates with problem difficulty, but the real dividing line is how much attention I expected it to require versus how much it wound up requiring. Therefore it is gated by my behavior beforehand rather than by being a Hard Problem.
Counterintuitively I find time-orientation to be a very effective method of getting out of analysis paralysis. This seems like a difference to me because the “time to do some rationality” trigger associates heavily with the deconfusion class of analytical strategies (in my mind). I suspect the underlying mechanism here is that analysis in the context of normal problems is mainly about efficiency, but the more basic loop of action-update-action-update is consistently more effective when information is lacking.
I think there’s something to time orientation having the notion of bash-my-face-against-the-problem-to-gather-information-about-it which makes it more effective than analysis for me a lot of the time because it has the information gathering step built in explicitly, whereas my concepts of analysis are still mostly just received from the subjects where I picked them up, leaving them in separate buckets. This makes me vulnerable to the problem of using the wrong analytical methods because almost all presentations of analysis assume the information being analyzed, and I have a limited sense of the proverbial type signature as a result.
I commonly make a similar transition that I describe as task orientation versus time orientation.
The transition happens when there is some project where there seems to some number of tasks to do and I expect it to be done (or get that step done, or whatever). This expectation then turns out to be wrong, usually because the steps fail directly or I didn’t have enough information about what needed to be done. Then I will explicitly switch to time orientation, which really just means that I will focus on making whatever progress is possible within the time window, or until complete.
One difference is that my experience isn’t sorted by problem difficulty per se. I mean it correlates with problem difficulty, but the real dividing line is how much attention I expected it to require versus how much it wound up requiring. Therefore it is gated by my behavior beforehand rather than by being a Hard Problem.
Counterintuitively I find time-orientation to be a very effective method of getting out of analysis paralysis. This seems like a difference to me because the “time to do some rationality” trigger associates heavily with the deconfusion class of analytical strategies (in my mind). I suspect the underlying mechanism here is that analysis in the context of normal problems is mainly about efficiency, but the more basic loop of action-update-action-update is consistently more effective when information is lacking.
I think there’s something to time orientation having the notion of bash-my-face-against-the-problem-to-gather-information-about-it which makes it more effective than analysis for me a lot of the time because it has the information gathering step built in explicitly, whereas my concepts of analysis are still mostly just received from the subjects where I picked them up, leaving them in separate buckets. This makes me vulnerable to the problem of using the wrong analytical methods because almost all presentations of analysis assume the information being analyzed, and I have a limited sense of the proverbial type signature as a result.