I feel the same debilitating anxiety when it comes to planning out career. It's become so bad that I have started ignoring it and instead checking emails and Hacker News for solace. Questions that keep me up:<p>1. What to learn next?<p>2. Is this the right career?<p>3. Shouldn't I be a CTO by now? What a failure!<p>4. Dude, you forgot about your family!! (Gasping for air)<p>so on and so forth...
I've learned a similar lesson, and incorporate a high-quality mechanical pencil and quad-ruled notepad in my personal workflow / productivity system. Thanks for sharing your insight, and good luck w/ ProjectPoll!
What you describe sounds very similar to my take on the Rubber Ducky method, except with writing things down instead of talking out loud. I think what works is the act of putting your thoughts out into a form you can then turn out and think of as external, then respond to. This enables you to look at it from an "outside perspective" even if it's literally your own perspective. It's hard to challenge your own ideas if you don't put yourself into that seat.
You captured the dilemma of "build the best product and launch it and feel that you've done it when you have not done anything towards finding the users Versus. go without a clean product and get into the act of finding users" very nicely.
Again, this is something like moving towards the real goal versus acknowledging the real goal but still continuing to stay where you are.
ProjectPoll.io is an outstanding idea.<p>I think your homepage copy buries the lede though.<p>For me, this was the a-ha moment: "ProjectPoll sends anonymous weekly surveys, that give you unprecedented insight into your teams and projects. We help you find and tackle the problems you didn't even know existed"