This starts off on a very pleasant late spring day, come to think of it, it was also kind of late in the day too. I had been working on my front square of dirt, no more than eight feet by eight feet, when my neighbor’s mother pulled into his driveway. As she got out, the conversation Randy, his wife, my wife, and I were having paused. We picked it back up with her now piled into the small talk. She was sharing a story about her week when she abruptly stopped and asked a question that was an equal amount of a statement: “He’s an engineer…” she fuffed out raising here eyebrows at me like a teacher from the 1800s would you a ruler to point.
My wife, catching the edge in her tone, answered with a flat “Yes,” that was more punctuation than agreement.
“Randy’s father is an engineer too,” she said, now pointing at him with her eyebrows. Randy shrugged. It was guy code for, “welcome to my world. “ A kind of apology for his mother waking up and choosing violence. I gave my own shrug back that said, “Damn bro. I feel your pain.” Then went back to lining up my stones in the fresh mulch. I adjusted one, decided I didn’t like its shape, and went back to the pile for something more symmetrical.
My wife asked, “How’d you know?”
“The stones,” my neighbor’s mother said. “Only an engineer would have them placed like that.”
Even I had to laugh at the truth in that. It was something I didn’t realize I was doing. Randy had been heading into his house thirty minutes earlier but stopped to help me with the placement, because from where he stood, he saw what I could not. Randy is also an engineer. Our wives aren’t, but they seem to enjoy our little quirks, until they’re being analyzed for optimization too.
Analysis, experimentation, optimization, and maintenance are how our brains work. Decisions at times come fast, other times they don’t come at all. In The Pragmatic Programmer, the concept of “good enough” is explained in a way that isn’t just good programming, it’s advice for life.
When what you do is rooted in logic and variables, control is the underpinning and the lashing to an anchor. Because of this, having clear rules of engagement, or license to just be “good enough,” needs to be spelled out for us. I can’t speak for others with dyslexia, but in my case, “good enough” is an alias for “I’m frustrated and mentally too tired to keep going.” The mental effort of checking, and checking again, then checking a few more times, has diminishing returns.
If an analysis goes on too long, it’s like saying a word too many times, you stop understanding it. Understanding the big picture turns into fixation on a minor detail. The modification of that minor detail creeps into another minor detail, until the big picture becomes a completely different painting. For me, that drift starts at the smallest unit there is, the word itself. I don’t confuse b, d, p, m, n, or u when I see them in a sentence. I just don’t acknowledge entire words, even though I may see them.
The same thing happens with things I’ve read a hundred times, not the letters, but where they came from. Something like the saying “insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results” turns into, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Both are correct, but one is misattributed while the other isn’t attributed at all, and that gap can become a measure of deeper knowledge, and a tool to brain-bully someone who accepted the attribution to the more publicly admired option.
How many times did you read the quote? Was it Alcoholics Anonymous or Albert Einstein you attributed it to? Did it start to lose meaning? Did you start to question yourself? Now answer all of those questions with the understanding that professional credibility is on the line, and multiply that against an imposed quarterly earnings requirement, and you start to understand how pressure is a compounding variable.
My analysis needs to walk away from the problem to process, but can get stuck in a loop. Analysis paralysis is not procrastination, it’s progress regression, not only in the project, but in the personal confidence of understanding the technical details. The technical, correct classification of this is semantic satiation.
I recently interviewed with a company that gave me a visual test. The diagram had a computer, a Wi-Fi router, a DNS server, a switch, a router, and a web server, marked with MAC addresses, IP addresses, and segment markers. I was asked: at what segment does the MAC address change?
I knew each NIC has its own MAC, and that MAC-based forwarding happens at layer 2. I also immediately understood that the icon on the switch marked it as layer 2, but there was so much on the page at once that while I was still processing the switch’s icon, I read the router’s icon as though it belonged to the switch.
I knew the MAC address changes at layer 3, but in my head, the layer-2 switch had become a layer-3 switch, meaning I placed the change at segment one instead of the correct segment. I wasn’t penalized for the wrong answer, because I knew the fundamentals and explained where the MAC changes; I’d just misidentified the segment. When I walked through my “why,” it became clear my mind had recorded the image correctly. With my variation of dyslexia, I knew something was visually wrong, I just couldn’t put my finger on it immediately.
Because I knew something was off, the problem came back to me that night. Lying in the dark, I saw it again and redrew the diagram from memory. Hours after seeing the original, I’d made an exact replica, and when I saw the horizontal arrows on the layer-2 switch, all I could do was sigh. In the interview, I’d wanted to stay on the problem, but years of active awareness had taught me the better move was to put it on a mental shelf for later. If this had been an actual workplace issue, that’s the point where I’d have asked someone to put a fresh set of eyes on it.
Analysis paralysis, indecisiveness, inaction inertia, and procrastination get used interchangeably, but they aren’t the same thing. Each describes a different way a decision can stall: indecisiveness is a standing trait, inaction inertia specifically needs two chances in a row, procrastination is delaying something you still mean to do. None of them fully capture what happens when a mental handicap, a learning disability, or being neurodivergent adds a layer underneath all of them, processing something as wrong before the problem-solving has even started.
I’ve learned not to beat myself up over it. The harder lesson was learning to admit I need a fresh perspective, without tearing myself down for needing it.
References:
ADHD and analysis paralysis
Oroian et al. (2025). “ADHD and Decision Paralysis.” European Psychiatry. PMC12438291.
Understood.org, “ADHD Coach Tips: Analysis Paralysis”
ADD.org, “ADHD Paralysis Is Real”
Autism and decision-making
Chernyshev. “Intolerance of Uncertainty and Challenges in Decision-making in Adults with High-Functioning Autism.” ResearchGate.
“Atypical Pupil-Linked Arousal… Intolerance of Uncertainty in Adults with ASD.” bioRxiv.
“Intolerance of Uncertainty Mediates the Relationship Between Autistic Traits and Propensity for Deliberation.” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 2025. Springer.
lifeskillsadvocate.com, “Intolerance of Uncertainty in Autism”
Dyslexia, working memory, and processing
Dehn. “Working Memory and Dyslexia.” Schoolhouse Educational Services.
“Linguistic and Cognitive Abilities in Children with Dyslexia.” PMC11941291.
upbility.net, “Processing Speed and Dyslexia”
Comorbidity of ADHD, autism, and dyslexia
Prevalence of comorbidity of autism and ADHD, EPINED study. Autism Research, 2024. Wiley.
“Prevalence of ASD and Co-morbidities in Children and Adolescents.” Systematic review. PMC8579007.
“Co-Occurrence of Developmental Disorders.” IntechOpen.
Willcutt et al. Twin study on dyslexia-ADHD comorbidity. PMC10478365.
“Are there shared neural correlates between dyslexia and ADHD?” PMC6873566.
“The Prevalence of ADHD Symptoms in Children with ASD.” Systematic review. PMC10498659.
Indecisiveness, confidence, and decision avoidance
Patalano, A. L., & LeClair, Z. (2011). “The influence of group decision making on indecisiveness-related decisional confidence.” Judgment and Decision Making, 6(2), 163-175. DOI: 10.1017/S1930297500004113. Open access.
Anderson, C. J. (2003). “The psychology of doing nothing: Forms of decision avoidance result from reason and emotion.” Psychological Bulletin, 129(1), 139-167.
“Decision avoidance and post-decision regret: a systematic review and meta-analysis.” 2023. PMC10575496.
“A Systematic Literature Study on the Avoidance of Decision-Making.” ijbea.com.
Iyengar, S. S., & Lepper, M. R. (2000). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (the “jam study,” choice overload).
“On the advantages and disadvantages of choice: future research directions in choice overload.” PMC11111947.
Samuelson, W., & Zeckhauser, R. (1988). Status quo bias.
Dhar, R. (1997). Consumer preference for a no-choice option.
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