How a simple mid-year review turned into weeks of uncertainty, courtesy of shiny new object syndrome…
Every year I do a mid-year business review. Usually that means I assess what I’ve been doing, and think about what needs to change, or continue, for the next six months.
I get out the plans I made at the beginning of the year and start with those, usually doing some adaptations but generally carrying on as I have been doing.
This year something different happened. I hauled out my plans from January 2024 and liked what I saw – my work then was well done.
Challenging times
But the intervening six months have been challenging: the loss of a major contract has meant a lot of financial uncertainty with accompanying anxiety. There’ve also been gains and lessons learned over the six months… but it’s been a generally intense passage of time.
And that made me look at my original plans from a different angle: was I doing enough to improve my finances, I wondered. I looked at my original goals in that light and decided they needed to be simplified into one big and simple thing: move to financial certainty (or, crudely put: make more money).
Then I challenged myself
Having done that, I then proceeded to make a mess of things. I took that nice simple goal and over-complicated it to the point of silliness.
It started out so well: I broke the One Goal into a set of sub-goals… and started to think about how I would get them done. Hmmm, I thought, is there a way to keep track of my goals in a more streamlined way than I have been doing so far?
The way I had done it before was undeniably clunky. It involved two or three spreadsheets, based on monthly reviews done on paper, which then translated into a weekly planning session where I wrote my plan for the week by hand into a large diary.
Because I’ve been finding that weekly handwritten planning exercise tedious (I often end up doing it on a Sunday afternoon), I wondered if I should rather do it all digitally.
Enter shiny new toy syndrome
My mid-year review rapidly turned chaotic. I wondered if there was an AI tool that could automate some of the planning work – at which point I started on the hunt for what’s known as a shiny new object, which means chasing the latest strategy, tactic, or advice making the rounds. The results, as outlined by Everhour (ironically, the purveyor of an online time tracker) are these:
Poor planning: plans never last long enough to be properly tested.
Wasting time: constantly adopting new products is a heavy time investment.
Stress and frustration: a set goal and a set way of doing things equal efficiency. Always chasing the new shiny thing forces you to be learning something new constantly.
All of those things happened once I started looking for an AI tool or app that could somehow streamline everything. I tried an AI calender app; I tried various project management and scheduling apps; I fiddled with Google calendar.
And for a good three weeks, I started every day feeling at sea, not knowing what I was supposed to be doing.
Back to basics
Eventually I got a grip and simplified things again. I made one big spreadsheet with all the work in it. I still do my planning on paper, but I’ve made templates to stick into my paper diary to make the planning process quicker. And I have made an iron-clad rule that I will do my planning for the next week on Friday afternoons so as not to have work encroaching on my weekend.
Understanding the impulse to “complexify”
It’s easy to understand shiny new object syndrome, whether it’s in our work or in our personal lives: our inner child wants that new app or cleaning gizmo or craft tool and it wants it now. But there may be other factors at play, over and above the pleasure of “getting”.
My Brave search engine’s AI function presented me with a list of possible causes of shiny new object syndrome, and many of them made sense to me (even though I had to rewrite and reorganise the text):
· Survivorship bias – overestimating the success of others who have adopted a new idea, while ignoring the failures.
· Perfectionism – which can lead to an inability to start or complete a project, causing a constant search for the next “shiny object” (in the quilting community there’s a term for the trail of unfinished projects hidden in everyone’s cupboard: UFOs or unfinished objects)..
· Fear of missing out (FOMO) – the pressure to keep up with the latest trends, products, or services, driven by the fear of being left behind or missing out on opportunities.
· Impulsivity – acting on impulse, without fully considering the potential consequences or feasibility of a new idea, can lead to a pattern of constantly chasing new objects.
· Lack of discipline and self-regulation – inability to prioritise, set boundaries, and maintain focus on long-term goals, leading to a tendency to jump from one new idea to the next.
· Unrealistic expectations – believing that a new idea or strategy will solve all problems or bring immediate success, rather than understanding that progress often requires time, effort, and perseverance.
And some thing things can make shiny new object syndrome worse:
· Social media and media – exposure to constant updates, ads, and success stories on social mediaand other platforms can create an environment that fosters shiny object syndrome.
· Lack of focus and direction – without a clear understanding of objectives, individuals and businesses may be distracted by every new idea, leading to a lack of commitment to a single goal.
I think something else was contributing to my unrealistic expectations (the idea that I could make things better by finding a tool to do the work). It appears there’s something called complexity bias, which the Farnam Street blog defines as “our tendency to look at something that is easy to understand… and view it as having many parts that are difficult to understand”.
Now, I didn’t necessarily think my need to simplify things meant I was seeing the problem as more complicated than it was. But this phrase from the article rang true: ”Of the fight-or-flight responses, complexity bias is the flight response. It is a means of turning away from a problem or concept…”
The impulse to find a new toy just needed to be added to a fear of failure in meeting my new and rather severe six-month goal for the result to be several weeks of confusion.
Over-complicating things has happened to me before, and it will happen again. As it will for many people… the trick is to know when it’s happening, to go back to basics and start again. And again. In that memorable phrase: “Keep it simple stupid.”
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Main picture: Aslı Yaren Peker, Unsplash
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