The plan is not the work

There is a particular kind of productive-feeling paralysis that looks exactly like progress: the roadmap gets longer, the spec gets more precise, the document gets better structured, and nothing ships.

Why it feels good

Planning has no failure state. A document cannot be wrong in the way a deployed feature can be wrong. You can revise it indefinitely and every revision feels like an improvement, because there is no user on the other end disagreeing with you. Shipping is the only activity that produces information you could not have predicted. Everything else is rearranging what you already believe.