How to Overcome Shiny Object Syndrome

You know that feeling when you’re bouncing around between tasks, lightly touching everything, but not necessarily completing anything? What your brain is doing in this scenario is called Continuous Partial Attention.

Continuous Partial Attention (CPA) means you’re rapidly shifting attention among tasks in a shallow and fragmented way, constantly scanning the environment for new information and alerts.

Basically, you’re constantly interrupting the thing you set out to do because something more fun, urgent, or important presents itself — aka Shiny Object Syndrome.

It’s really easy to fall into CPA, and most of us spend a lot of time there without realizing it. It’s technically a trait that helped our species survive back when we had to keep an eye out for literal threats to our life. But now, we lend this survival skill to checking our inboxes and slack notifications for new information, and it ends up being the default state for many of us.

While CPA can be a useful strategy in certain situations (like monitoring multiple streams of information or responding to urgent matters), chronically and excessively being in this state can have negative effects on cognitive performance, well-being, and relationships. You know the feeling at the end of a busy day where you look back and don’t even know what you actually got done, yet you’re completely fried, frazzled, and irritable? That’s a result of excessive CPA.

When we do this consistently, we fall into a habit of only performing shallow work (which has its place), but in order to make long term progress, it’s important to incorporate deep work.

Cal Newport (who literally wrote the book on this) refers to deep work as “Professional activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit.” Essentially, if you perform an activity (that you’re already skilled at) in an environment with zero distractions, you’ll produce top-notch, high-quality work that’s hard to replicate otherwise.

If you’re wondering whether or not you’re executing deep work, it’s unlikely that you are. Deep work isn’t something that happens accidentally. It requires effort to carve out the time and create the conditions for it to happen. Doing this allows us to sink to the level of focus that helps us produce our best work, so the effort is worthwhile.

Cal Newport identifies four primary deep work styles in his book, and we’ve adapted them into four archetypes that can help you make deep work fit into your life regardless of how it’s structured.

Once you’ve figured out how to integrate deep work into your schedule, it’s time to actually sit down and do it. Carving out the right conditions is arguably the hardest part, so we’ve turned this into a simple formula to help you follow through.

If you want to incorporate some gentle accountability and do deep work with community, we host virtual deep work sessions all week long. So wherever you fall on the spectrum of archetypes, or if you just want to put Flow State Formula into practice, we’ve created a space to help you focus — all you have to do is show up.