I&#x27;m naturally a perfectionist, so I fall into this trap often, though I&#x27;ve gotten better over time. I rely on a few simple tricks (ugh, the buzzfeed headline practically writes itself):<p>1. If I&#x27;m stuck and can&#x27;t decide which path to take, it&#x27;s usually because I don&#x27;t have enough data to tell which path is better. The fastest way to get that data is to pick one path arbitrarily and start walking down it. Pretty soon, it will be become obvious if it&#x27;s the wrong path.<p>2. One of my favorite things about code is that it&#x27;s infinitely malleable. Especially thanks to the magic of Git, I can undo any change. Nothing is permanent which means no decision is carved in stone. Deciding isn&#x27;t deciding what to do for<i>ever</i>, it&#x27;s deciding what to do for <i>now</i>.<p>3. Sometimes I get stuck trying to do a depth-first traversal of the fractal tree of all possible implications of the program. Going depth-first down every single edge case and rathole is not an efficient way to get something up and running.<p>You really want to go breadth-first or best-first instead. To do that, you need to leave markers in your code of which branches remain to be explored. Those are TODO comments. So instead of falling into a rathole and not making progress on the thing that&#x27;s at the forefront of my mind right now, I just leave a TODO, &quot;Figure out what to do here if the ___ doesn&#x27;t ___.&quot;<p>TODOs are great because they help my current velocity by not getting sidetracked <i>and</i> my future velocity by giving me something to pick up on when I finish something else. I pretty frequently search my code for TODO and grab one that sounds fun.