Avoid Learning Things That Do Not Compound

We are often ought to complete a task or learn a new thing; however, decision paralysis may hinder your ability to clearly define the boundaries. For many people, grasping the basics is not enough and they would like to rigorously study the subject, leading to inability to deliver on time.

If you are going to learn some new stuff, pr, for example, you are weighing in the prospects of accepting a job offer - always think about the consequences of your choice, or, more specifically, about if the stuff you'd be doing will compound, a term heavily used in finance. Simply put - can you use your newly acquired skills elsewhere and build on their foundation.

Make use of the personal development thought map. Write down your possible choices and evaluate them based on how long of a continuous connecting line you could draw. Group them by some overlapping feature, link them together.

After writing down your initial scopes of interest, try to build a nested tree and arrange the items in such a way, that each item could find itself on a single level only and would allow for the minimal number of downgoing branches. Consider comparing the items by the effort required to do/learn stuff, time to complete the task, number of interconnection points with other items, and some other properties you may consider important personally. Ideally, you should eventually get to a flatted-out sequence of steps (that is, one item organically follows another), but if you're not able to achieve perfection, you'll end up with a tree of varying complexity. If so, evaluate not by the item, but by the branch from top to bottom, applying the same principle.

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