I also program. Most of my lost time is due to repeated mental calculations of the cost of each approach in execution vs maintainability.

If left unchecked, I will do nothing and keep thinking. I’ve found that writing it down and trying any option without giving much weight to my intuition, helps a lot. Sure, I may need to rewrite some parts again, but it’s faster for me to do that instead of optimising the first attempt. Plus by the second time, I’ll have a better idea of the thing. I try to apply this not only to feature development but also debugging. I work close to hardware too so debugging is quite complex.