Conquered Shiny Object ... But How Do You Handle Shiny "Action" Syndrome?

I have 3 plans, short term, medium term and long term.

Short term Is this months Income and Improving it over last months income

Medium Term is where i want to be in 3-6 months time.

Long term is where i want to be in 5 years.

To work on them I make a plan every monday morning, on what aspect i want to focus on.. then I just do it.

Once you simplify things, life gets much easier

Instead of having multiple products or sites have 1 main product , 1 main site and everything you do is focused on driving traffic to those resources.

I know a lot of people suggest the tactic of prioritizing the night before. Before you go to bed, make a note of the most important things you need to do the next game, in order. Then when you wake up, get your coffee and get after it!

It's probably best to knock out the first action item (or 2) before doing anything else. Don't check your email, or social media. Once you have these action items out of the way you can catch up on email.

After that, right back to your list of ToDos!

The human mind is engineered to focus on one thing until it finishes it. If we start doing other things before completing our task, we experience disturbance, and dissatisfaction:

Zeigarnik Effect

"The automatic system signals to the conscious mind, which may be focused on new goals, that a previous activity was left incomplete. It seems to be human nature to finish what we start and, if it is not finished, we experience dissonance."

Focus on one thing intensely until it is done, then go on to the next thing. But make sure it is the right thing. How do you know it was the right thing? Evaluate it afterwards, and if it failed, either stop doing it, or do it a different way next time.

Just take action. Even if one starts losing money when taking action. It's a lot better than buying and buying and buying and buying and buying.

Great post! But while I certainly agree with the 99% of this post, I do disagree with this particular bullet point. What the above describes is experimentation and I think it's actually very important for businesses -- especially new ones. I'm a huge fan of serial entrepreneur/academic Steve Blank who defines a startup as "an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model". (He's talking about tech startups, but I think what he says applies to all new businesses). When you really think about what this means, I think it's really powerful.

The long explanation can be found in Blank's seminal book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany (the first few chapters can be found here: http://web.stanford.edu/group/e145/cgi-bin/winter/drupal/upload/handouts/Four_Steps.pdf), but in short, Blank recommends treating your business model as a set of hypotheses. For instance, you may think you know what your customers want, but do you really? You may think you know the best way to market your product, but do you? You may think you know how your competitors will respond, but do you? And so on.

So how do you know if you're right? You test your hypotheses!

In general, I think we're talking about the same thing: you don't want your efforts to be so scattered that you never have time to figure out what's effective and what's not. Some hypotheses can take months to test and evaluate and if those hypotheses are central to your business model, it's important to follow throw on those to that you can learn and adjust. But some hypotheses are smaller, much smaller and in that case sometimes it really does make sense to "throw different actions against the wall" to see "what sticks". A few examples:

• Let's say you have $1,000 that you've budgeted for advertising. Is it better to buy Facebook Ads, AdWords or buy ads directly from a website whose audience you want to reach? My answer: spend $50 on each and find out!
• We knew that our customers liked a certain type of product, but was it worth our time/money to create our own or should we just point to an existing product as an affiliate and save the trouble? To figure that out we created and sold one of these products. It turns out that it was very much worth it for us to make them and so we're developing a bunch more of these products that we can sell too.
• Similar to the above example, we're currently contemplating a switch from an affiliate-based model to a more traditional e-commerce model. But this would be a huge change for us that could easily backfire. Is it worth it? How much work would it take? What kind of work would it take? At this point, I really don't know, but we're approaching this question very experimentally. For instance, in early 2015, I hope to sell a select few products using Fulfillment by Amazon -- products that our customers won't even know are ours. For them it'll be just another Amazon link. But we'll use that experience to help us judge the work requirements and the profit margins that we can expect if we were to switch. But even if that's successful, we'll definitely run some other experiments before we'd even consider doing a changeover. Is it better to do fulfillment on our own? How best should we implement a shopping cart? What's our pricing strategy going to be?

The point is that while you're right that good businesses don't run blindly from thing to thing, good businesses do throw things at walls (though they certainly choose with care what they're throwing and make sure they're aiming right!) In other words they do experiments.

All that said, I definitely don't want to come across like I disagree with the rest of your post. The whole school that says, "All you need to do is take action" (or as it's often written, "MASSIVE action") is just wishful thinking. Taking action for action's sake doesn't help anybody -- it's smart actions that count. But I'd argue that part of being smart is taking actions you can learn from.

This is so true. Just taking action for the sake of being busy is just as innefective as jumping from one method to the next.

In fact, I have done this myself. I stopped buying every new product out there and started doing things that wherent getting me anywhere. I believed that just taking action (any kind of action) was better than nothing. How wrong I was

I think what really helps a lot is to laser focus on a single thing you would like to accomplish. And from their write down your goals, and take solid action every day. Goal setting is the foundational key to success, if you aren't writing down your goals you're just a wishful thinker. As mentioned up above it's about having specific goals, short term , mid term, and long term. I like to set out monthly goals for myself and break it down into bite sized daily goals. If I focus on a consistent midterm goal, and take daily action with bite size daily goals, over a year I will have accomplished many of my goals creating long term results. Always remember: With no action comes no results!

Action is important, however, you do not want "action without accomplishment!" Regardless of the endeavor, a person must have or find a way to measure progress to see if their action is contributing to a bigger picture. What that means is that a person must have an eye on both the small and big picture. My two sense!

If I subscribed to this mentality, I wouldn't be providing for my family - and then some.

Best place to be is somewhere in between your two schools of thought, but much more on the action side.

That's not hard. Unsubscribe from all internet marketers. Empty your inbox. Only keep 3 of the best ones that suit your current business model or really give you actionable value.

My personal rule is that after purchasing one product that suits my model (i.e. FB ads, CPM, list building or whatever), I abstained for 4 months from buying another one until I really implement what's taught in that product or working on my own.

I remember there's this really inexpensive (just around $10) guide by Tiffany Dow about making profit from your shiny object syndrome. Basically if you fall into the trap of buying new products, then make a thorough, honest review about them in your own website. Tell people whether this product is worth buying or not.

My thought is don't just "take action", take "calculated action".