Shiny Object Syndrome
Many of us have experienced the absolute draining experience that is having an idea, working on it, two weeks later lose interest and start something else, leaving a graveyard of ideas in our wake. This is often called "Shiny Object Syndrome" and even just the name alone almost gives away what it's about without further elaboration.
Shiny Object Syndrome is when you keep starting over on new ideas, concepts or hobbies and quickly give them up for something else new and shiny not too long after. The time it takes can change, for some it's within a couple of days, for some it's within one to two weeks and for others it might last a month. Already before you reach the point of switching over to something else you start feeling an itch to do something else but you push it aside a bit to hopefully finish this time. Because this time it's different.
But then you blink and find yourself back on a new project.
While this is frustrating and something you can get stuck in as a habit it's also a type of burnout. You feel like you keep working on something but you are getting nowhere. Like your wheels are spinning in place. You are climbing a mountain but you can never see the top. Work seems insurmountable and you never get anywhere.
How To Help It
Luckily there are ways to help this. You are not broken or wrong or not able to do things. You are a motivated individual and you want to create things. You like the rush of learning new things, trying new things and exploring new ideas. Otherwise you wouldn't be in the place that you are in to begin with. But so, then how do you help it?
It's one simple thing that's really hard to execute on when you don't know how to do it; Learn To Finish Projects.
Finishing and releasing projects is a skill. It's a skill you need to hone to get better at it. Because truly almost no matter what project you make, you can likely always improve on it. There are probably things you can do better, things you can tweak, things you can tune. But in the end you would be doing that forever instead of working on yourself and grow as a person. Some wise person once said "Art is never finished, merely abandoned." and that goes for most projects you do too, in creative projects especially. Although I would make a clear distinction here. I would say that, you can finish a project. You can decide that enough is enough and that you are ready to move on and do something else. But completing a project is a very different thing and likely something you will never do or at least rarely do.
So how do you learn how to finish things when you supposedly keep starting new projects? You do an exercise of course! This exercise was taught to me long ago and it's called the "Sticky Note Exercise". The exercise requires two things:
- A pencil or pen.
- A stack of sticky / yellow notes.
That's all you need. Now what you do is take a sticky note, write a specification on it for a thing you want to make, but make the specification so unambiguous that you could hand it to a stranger and they'd almost exactly understand what you are trying to make and explain it back to you. Then make that thing. That's it really. It will be a very small project but that's the whole point! You need to learn how to finish projects, not constantly start new ones and leave unfinished projects in your wake. Once you've finished that project you get to feel some sense of success, however small and fleeting, and then you do another one. You will be doing a couple of these until you are ready to move on.
Then you add another sticky note. Now you literally have double the specification space! And then after some time, you add a third note, then a fourth, then half a standard page / A4 page, then a full page and before you know it you will be writing several pages worth of specifications for projects that you can finish. You will get it wrong some times, most likely most times, but that's okay! Project scoping and estimation is a skill that no one will ever truly master, only get a little better at.
Because at the end of the day; if you can't make those other projects that you keep leaving behind then it's because you can't fulfil the scope and requirements needed to do the project. And when that happens, you have to reduce scope. So really, this whole exercise is an exercise in learning how to scope and learning how to finish projects and move on to other ones so you can keep growing.
I hope this was helpful to you because I know that it was to me :)