One realisation I came to was that I would find excuses and ways to do the things that weren't uncomfortable for me in building a startup - less meetings, less marketing, more development than made sense...
But the most insidious part of fixing this in myself, once reflecting upon it, was that some things had the veneer of helping or counteracting my mistakes, but if anything, made things worse.
For example - I was doing too little marketing (classic). I built a reddit bot to analyse mentions of the startup, use basic ChatGPT to find posts I should respond to, to both understand customers and their problems better, and to promote.
Reality? I did this, but such things, and comments where I only promoted my startup indirectly about 1/3rd of the time was significantly worse value for my time as compared to posting videos/GIFs on reddit or other social media which unapologetically focused on what we uniquely did that no other competitors were doing.
For listening, I should had set up interviews. But I relied on this crutch of feeling I was doing marketing by checking reddit every day with this script. Really, it was just technical work, while reducing my marketing... The opposite of what I should have done. It only took a couple of days to build, but still. Another crutch I would say is using Github issues/todo boards when not at the scale for that level of detail/requirements, especially on prototype projects.
What crutches have you observed yourself using?
