A common cause of overthinking is that you’re confused, so you keep trying to do better, but you’re not really sure what’s better, so you stay confused.
If you can’t evaluate success and failure well, then you can work on something endlessly but never know when it’s done. In that case, roughly half of your changes will make it worse instead of better, so you’re not making progress.
Hmm. That makes sense. I think I kinda have that with trying to get my home clean and organized. I don’t have too clear of an idea of what the success is I’m aiming for. Am I trying to make my house perfectly spotless? Am I trying to make my house have perfect interior decoration? How organized do I need things to be? Some kind of perfect organization or just good enough or do I just want things to look organized and not really care about the functionality of the organization?
I do have levels of clean and organization I’m satisfied with at any given time, but I don’t have a good idea of what a truly organized house is.
If you want to work on a topic that you don’t know much about, you should set goals that you understand. Instead of succeeding at or within the topic, you can have a goal like exploring the topic. Then you can do some activities (like reading and watching things) and confidently evaluate whether you succeeded at your goal. If you read a few things and know more than before, then you succeeded at a generic exploration goal. You can also set more specific goals like to read a book (or better, to try reading it and finish it only if you like it) or to find out what a term means.
I think in the past there have been certain subjects that I didn’t know much about that I would struggle to do. A lot of science stuff. In high school I was kinda made to take harder science classes but I barely understood the basic stuff. I remembered trying to figure out how to do the complex stuff on test days and trying to come up with a method. It was bad. I had no idea of what was actually correct or not. A lot of it was just feeling.
On a different note: a lot of people in my AP Chemistry class did terrible, yet we all got A’s and B’s cause of the curve. I think its crazy that you can get a score as low as 10% on an exam and still get an A because of curving.
A big goal can be divided into sub-goals, which can be divided into sub-sub-goals, until you get to small parts that you understand how to work on and evaluate whether your work was successful.
Hmm. Maybe I can try breaking up a big goal into a bunch of more manageable sub goals. Something like making a website. The making itself, afaik, is easy, but thinking of what to have on the website, how I should have it set-up, etc. seems like a bigger more daunting goal.