One of my favourite quotes comes from Winnie-the-Pooh.
“Did You Ever Stop to Think and Forget to Start Again?”
Sometimes we all over analyse. Especially in software testing, sometimes we just look too deep, we get lost in the details and we fail to see the big picture. We stop. Sometimes we forget to restart, or when we do restart then the time has past. Have you ever spent a day trying to reproduce a bug, only to find that in the meantime the next stable build had corrected the failure anyway? Have you ever got so side-tracked, maybe installing that piece of software, that the point of installing it in the first place becomes lost?
Focus is important in testing but equally important is timely focus. The importance of the service that software testing provides should not be overlooked, but also we should not be naive enough to assume that others will wait for the service. Time moves on, projects move on, and people move on. Quickly. So do stop to think, but always quickly start again.