Analysis Paralysis

Analysis paralysis, or paralysis by analysis, is a state in which a person or group examines a situation so exhaustively that forward motion or decision making becomes stuck, so that no course of action is chosen within a natural or reasonable time frame. It is one of the outcomes of overanalyzing or overthinking a problem: a situation may come to seem too complicated to resolve, or a decision may be delayed so long that it becomes effectively too late, often out of anxiety that a larger problem could still emerge. A person caught in it may hold out hope that a better solution is only one more step of analysis away and keep pursuing it indefinitely with no sense of diminishing returns, a pattern driven by the fear of making an error, or of giving up a superior option, outweighing the realistic value of simply deciding within a reasonable time; in critical situations this can grow into a larger problem than the decision itself, when a response is not reached fast enough.