I recently had coffee with a university colleague who told me she was in the middle of planning a workshop. She had bought a couple of books about hosting workshops, had created a spreadsheet projecting attendance under different scenarios, and was now comparing ticketing platforms. But she still hadn’t invited a single person.
We talked about how none of that research was necessarily a waste of time. When you love learning, figuring out the best approach can be enjoyable in itself. But every answer can produce another question, and before you know it, preparation has become the project.
Worse, that endless research keeps you busy while the harder questions wait: Will anybody be interested? Am I any good at this?
The psychology of endless research
You could call this a problem of overthinking, but research points instead to several nuanced and overlapping tendencies that can make gathering information feel easier, safer, and more satisfying than taking action.
A better option could be hiding somewhere. You might find a venue that suits your workshop and still spend another weekend looking because there might be an even better option out there. Psychologists call this tendency to seek the best possible choice maximizing, and studies suggest that people higher in maximizing tendency explore more alternatives before selecting one.
Research feels like a respectable form of avoidance. The task we’re avoiding may expose us to rejection, uncertainty, or embarrassment; reading about it does not. In that way, psychologists have argued that procrastination can serve as a form of short-term mood regulation, which is why we often find ourselves opening another tab instead of taking action.
Thinking itself can feel rewarding. Psychologists use the term need for cognition to describe how much people enjoy sustained mental effort. People higher in this trait tend to put more effort into decisions and are less inclined to change their research approach under time pressure.
Without a clear sense of when to stop, it’s easy to keep looking. Researchers found that participants with a stronger need for certainty spend longer gathering information, particularly when there is no clear rule for making a choice. You might have studied many different ways to run workshops, without knowing what would make one preferable to the others. Reading more about each approach may give you a better understanding of your options without bringing you any closer to a decision.
Taken together, these tendencies help explain why the research phase of a project can be so tempting to linger in. Depending on your intellectual curiosity and how you respond to uncertainty, mapping possibilities and comparing approaches can feel more rewarding than the practical work of bringing an idea to life.
This isn’t limited to professional projects — the same pattern can show up when you’re exploring a new hobby or trying to change a habit. You can spend weeks learning about something without ever taking action to find out what it’s like to actually do it.
How to turn research into action
If you tend to get stuck in research mode, you don’t need to force yourself to become less curious. You just need to recognize when you’ve learned enough theory, and when your question can only be answered through direct experience.
Here are three simple steps you can follow to put what you’ve learned into practice and use the results to decide what to do next:
1. First, take stock of what you know. Write down what you’ve already learned about the different moving parts of the project. Alongside it, list the concrete ideas you could act on. You’ll probably find that your bottleneck isn’t more theoretical knowledge, but evidence and direct experience from the real world.
2. Next, run a tiny experiment. Decide what you will test and the trial period, using this mini protocol: I will [action] for [duration]. For the would-be workshop organizer, this could be: “I will invite three people to a 30-minute pilot session each week for three weeks.” The point isn’t to figure out every single detail, but to collect the real-world data no comparison chart can ever tell you: whether people show up, the questions they ask, and what parts you enjoy running.
3. Finally, reflect before deciding on your next steps. What surprised you? What would you change? Use those observations to design another tiny experiment or — if you do need to conduct more research — to explore a more focused question with a clear stopping rule for making a choice.
Good research helps us make better decisions, but there are questions it simply cannot answer without real-world data. By applying an experimental mindset, you can gather evidence about what works, what doesn’t, and what you still need to figure out.
You may still have plenty of questions after your first experiment. Some might send you back to your research, this time with a clearer idea of what you’re looking for. Others may turn out to be far less important than you imagined. The only way to find out is to try something and see what actually happens. And in the meantime, you’ll have made some progress on bringing your idea to life.
This article Why smart people stay stuck in research mode is featured on Big Think.