Hiding in Complexity

I have this problem. I procrastinate. Not all the time, but often. The thing is you wouldn’t notice it just by watching me. I always appear to be busy. The problem is I often hide in complexity.

The best example I can come up with is when it comes to sales. I know the best way to make sales is to simply reach out to someone, whether that is a phone call, an e-mail or LinkedIn message. It’s simple, yet hard to do. It is much easier for me to waste a whole week coming up with the perfect database for tracking who I should call and how often and logging all the results. Conquering all that complexity feels like I have accomplished something. Unfortunately at the end of the week I have made zero phone calls and sold nothing. You might say “Well you thought ahead and now that you have a system, things should work better.” Unfortunately, I just find ways to improve the system in order to continue to avoid making phone calls.

It’s not just sales, but I see this pattern in other areas of my life as well. If you look you might too. I often see it when coding. Often on a project, there are a few small parts of the code that really move the ball forward. However, we often get sucked into the weeds over unimportant details. We waste a bunch of time writing a super robust logging routine instead of tackling the algorithm at the heart of our project. Or at a project management level we spend a ton of time customizing Jira to get the workflow just right when simple post-it notes would do the job.

Where do you find yourself hiding in complexity? What are you avoiding?