Stop Chasing Every New Idea! Here’s How.
Photo by cottonbro studio
Are you suffering from “shiny object syndrome”?
I know I am, or rather, I used to.
Either you’re nodding along right now because you KNOW you have a shiny object problem, or you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about.
And if you fall into the latter camp, here’s a quick definition.
“Shiny Object Syndrome” is when you have so many great ideas, or so many appealing opportunities coming your way, that you bounce from one to the other (to the other, and so on) without ever making real progress on any of them.
For me, it’s about ideas.
Ideas for my business.
Ideas for this blog.
Ideas for knitting and crochet projects.
Ideas for pottery.
You get the picture; I just have SO MANY ideas.
And both ideas and opportunities come my way at a rate that is much faster than my ability to execute them.
I’m betting the same might be true for you.
For instance, I publish one blog post a week. However, I think about about 5-7 ideas for blog posts every week.
Not all of my ideas are good, for sure.
But it’s hard to see that sometimes when they’re right in front of me.
That’s the thing about shiny objects; when the light is shining on them, it’s hard to see anything else.
So, what can you do?
You can put these ideas in a “parking lot”. (Preferably a dark one.)
When you put a little distance between you and the shiny object, when you reduce the light just a bit, many of these shiny objects will lose their luster.
When you’ve put your ideas in a parking lot, and turned off the lights, you can see these ideas for what they really are.
You’ll see that all that sparkles is not, in fact, gold.
Will some of these ideas be good ones? Be worth pursuing?
Yes, of course.
But the distance will help you see the difference between the ideas that are worth pursuing and those that are just shiny.
At present moment, I have 423 ideas for blog posts in my blog posts parking lot.
I may never write about most of these things. That’s OK.
Because when I go in to plan out my content, the good ones bubble up to the top.
Because the really good ones hold their luster even in the dark.
So it’s easier to see them after they’ve been in the parking lot for a while.
Want another example?
I also keep a parking lot for ideas I have for my business.
Stuff that I think is a good idea, but that I haven’t allotted time for.
There are over 500 things on this list.
I won’t do most of them.
In fact, many of them would have only made sense at an earlier stage of my business, but now don’t make sense at all.
But by keeping them in a parking lot you accomplish the following:
They don’t take up valuable brain space
They won’t mess with your prioritization because they're not in your primary task list
You won’t me overwhelmed by them, because you haven’t decided to pursue them, and thus they’re not staring you in the face day after day and, perhaps most importantly,
You know you won’t lose/forget them.
With the parking lot strategy, I know I’ll be able to pick the best of the best when I’m deciding how to spend my time, my most limited resource.
Now, I bet you’ve got one big question looming:
How do you make sure that stuff doesn’t stay in the parking lot forever?
Well, you make sure to review it every once and awhile.
You’ll review it
Decide if there’s anything you truly want to commit to, and
If so, move it into your primary task system and dedicate the time and energy to make it happen.