Shiny Object Syndrome

Have you ever experienced this?

You set a goal for what you want to accomplish the day. Then, you open your email, Twitter page or Facebook page. Before you know it, several hours have gone by.

Then, you focus on a couple of projects which have deadlines coming up fast. In the mean time, you clicked on several pages (that are still open in your browser), engaged with several conversations with fans or followers you’ve never met (except online) and keep going back to that email box hoping that something exciting will arrive since the last time you checked … 30 minutes ago.

Right now, I have 10 windows open using Word, 2 with Front Page, 8 sites open in Explorer, 4 in Firefox, Outlook, Palm Pilot, note pad … and the 3 messages in Skype would still be there if I hadn’t decided that not replying now would leave them hovering in cyberspace forever.

That one goal – to post on my blog – still remains unfinished.

Sound familiar?

I’m calling this the “Shiny Object Syndrome.” I used to call it the “Shiny Lure Phenomenon,” but probably not enough fisher-people for it to be a keeper.

But, sadly I’m not the first.

I just Googled it, and the first site calls it … SOS. It’s “Eeek! Shiny Object Syndrome!” by Karyn Greenstreet. Karen has a practical definition, too: “small business owners are getting distracted by too many ideas or the latest fad, going off in a million directions and never completing anything.”

She says it’s responsible for “hundreds of hours a year in lost productivity, lost hours, lost dollars.” Eeek … indeed!

On the next link on my Google search, Tim Moss adds another helpful word to our disease. It’s the “Bright Shiny Object Syndrome.”

Hey, did you know that you could hold the “Ctrl” key on your PC keyboard and “Click” on each of the 10 sites that come up on a Google search page … and each site comes up in a new window?

This keeps you from having to go back-and-forth from Google-to-site-to-Google-to-site-to-Google-to-site. I learned this trick from Armand Morin.

That’s all we need … faster ways to see more shiny objects in less time. At least you got a tip out of reading this far!