Say more? I’m curious at what level you’re thinking about this. Is this at the level of individual thought, group action, or something broader? Also, what do you see as the connection between Analysis Paralysis and Research Winter? I wouldn’t naturally connect those ideas.

my definition of "research winter" is just a period of time when you have an idea but you don't know how to implement it, if someone has done something similar already, etc.... In my case I tend to go through a BFS of "prior art", afraid I may be wasting my time in something that has been done before (worse: proven wrong or useless before), etc

A related phenomenon I’ve experienced is doubting your tooling. I don’t have a good name for it, but I find it hard to settle on a toolset for a project. I have found it helpful to start by building one to throw away with a minimal set of tooling I’m comfortable with (and then I don’t throw it away).

right, I guess when you have no restrictions is hard to settle down for a particular language, for instance

One example is that you are designing a new language on github, and a few people have graciously submitted bug reports or contributed changes. Now you have users! There are some new language features you would like to add, but what about maintaining backward compatibility. If you screw up an experimental language change, then you'll need to later go back and make a non-backward compatible change. Which would be terrible! Better get the design perfect the first time.

The struggle is real. Best is to have a good absolutely-not-going-to-do list.

haha somehow I never heard about the not-to-do list 😛

@Emmanuel Oga I rejected... three bug reports today using the not-to-do list.