How to Design Your Personal “Focus Funnel”: A Framework for Eliminating Distractions and Winning Big

Your time, energy, and attention are your true leverage points—yet most knowledge workers leak all three through endless notifications, reactive inboxes, and poorly prioritized to‑do lists. This pillar guide shows you how to design your personal “Focus Funnel”: a practical, evidence‑aware framework for eliminating distractions, channeling effort into high‑impact work, and ultimately winning big on the goals that matter. You’ll learn the underlying logic of the Focus Funnel, how to audit your current distraction profile, and how to architect layers that filter, focus, and generate flow—so you can consistently produce deep work without burning out.

Understanding the Focus Funnel Framework

Before you can build a Focus Funnel that reliably turns intention into meaningful output, you need to understand what it is, why distraction elimination is non‑negotiable, and how attention science underpins the entire system. This section lays the conceptual foundation: a shared language, a clear problem definition, and the cognitive principles that make a personal Focus Funnel both necessary and scalable.

Defining the Personal Focus Funnel

A Personal Focus Funnel is a structured, repeatable decision and execution pathway that takes every incoming demand on your attention—tasks, messages, ideas, obligations—and systematically narrows them through three essential layers: Filter, Focus, and Flow. Instead of treating productivity as a chaotic to‑do list, the Focus Funnel forces each input to prove its worth, earn its place on your calendar, and be executed in the conditions that maximize depth and speed. In simple english: it’s a framework that helps you say “no” fast, say “yes” wisely, and work deeply when it counts.

• Filter: Ruthlessly prioritize high‑impact, goal‑aligned tasks and eliminate or delegate the rest.
• Focus: Construct distraction‑proof environments and time blocks where shallow work cannot intrude.
• Flow: Engineer conditions—rituals, boundaries, recovery—that help you slip into sustained, peak‑performance states.

Designing your Focus Funnel means codifying these layers into rules, routines, and tools that you can trust when your day gets noisy.

Why Eliminating Distractions Matters

Distractions don’t just waste minutes; they fracture momentum, dilute cognitive bandwidth, and quietly downgrade the quality of your decisions. Most people don’t lose their best work to laziness—they lose it to context switching, unfiltered commitments, and always‑on communication channels. By eliminating distractions upstream, you protect the downstream results: deeper thinking, faster execution, and more strategic clarity.

• Context Switching Cost: Rapid task toggling resets your mental state, shrinking the amount of time you spend in meaningful progress.
• Attention Fragmentation: Persistent pings and micro‑interruptions keep you in a reactive loop, making deep work feel impossible.
• Decision Fatigue: When every notification asks for a choice, your willpower drains before you touch your most important task.
• Strategic Drift: Without a filter, you slowly work on what’s urgent for others instead of what’s important for you.

The Focus Funnel solves these issues by making attention management your default operating system, not an afterthought.

The Science of Attention and Deep Work

The Focus Funnel aligns with well‑established insights from cognitive psychology and behavioral science: attention is limited, willpower is exhaustible, and environment reliably shapes behavior. Deep work—sustained, distraction‑free concentration on cognitively demanding tasks—requires conditions that reduce cognitive load and decision noise. Your brain thrives when it can batch similar tasks, commit to a single cognitively heavy objective, and operate inside a stable rhythm of focus and recovery. In practice, this means:

• Single‑Tasking Beats Multitasking: Working on one high‑leverage task at a time preserves working memory and accelerates learning.
• Boundaries Create Freedom: Time blocks, app limits, and notification rules free your prefrontal cortex from constant vigilance.
• Rituals Reduce Friction: Pre‑work routines, consistent start times, and clear shutdown processes conserve willpower and lower activation energy.
• Recovery Fuels Depth: Sleep, breaks, and mindful pauses restore attention, enabling more frequent entry into flow states.

When you architect your Focus Funnel around these principles, you’re not “trying harder”—you’re building a system that makes the right behavior the easiest default.

Assessing Your Current Focus and Distraction Profile

Before you can fine-tune your Focus Funnel, you must first gain clarity about where your attention is leaking and which habits are holding you back. This section serves as a diagnostic stage—helping you evaluate your current focus patterns, uncover hidden distractions, and measure your mental clarity. By auditing your daily activities, identifying productivity killers, and tracking your attention span, you create a factual baseline from which meaningful improvement can begin.

Auditing Daily Habits and Interruptions

A successful focus strategy starts with understanding how you currently spend your time. Many professionals underestimate the cumulative impact of micro-interruptions—like checking email between tasks or glancing at phone notifications every few minutes. A simple but effective audit will highlight which activities add value and which drain your productivity.

Begin by tracking your day in 15- to 30-minute intervals for at least three consecutive days. Document what you were doing, what triggered task-switching, and whether each activity contributed to your key goals. You might notice patterns such as:

• Reactive Workflows: Spending the first few hours of your day responding to emails or instant messages instead of working on deep, high-priority tasks.
• Context Switching: Jumping between tools (e.g., email, project management, chat apps) without finishing the current task.
• Distraction Loops: Opening social media “just for a second,” which spirals into 20 minutes of lost focus.
• Unplanned Interruptions: Frequent unscheduled meetings, phone calls, or co-worker drop-ins breaking your flow.

Once you recognize the recurring interruptions, you can start to build barriers—like dedicated “offline” work blocks or batch-checking communication apps—to protect your attention span.

Identifying Your Top Productivity Killers

Not all distractions are created equal. Some are internal (like mental clutter or fatigue), while others are external (like phone alerts or background noise). By naming and ranking your top productivity killers, you can eliminate or reduce them systematically.

Common productivity killers include:

• Digital Clutter: Excessive open browser tabs, endless email newsletters, or apps that compete for attention.
• Information Overload: Spending more time consuming content than producing meaningful results.
• Task Overwhelm: A to-do list that mixes trivial tasks with high-value projects, leaving you unsure where to start.
• Decision Fatigue: Making too many small choices each day, leaving you mentally drained for strategic work.
• Environmental Noise: Visual or auditory distractions that keep you from entering deep work states.

To tackle these issues, use strategies like the “rule of three” (choosing the top three tasks that will move you forward each day), app decluttering, or designating no-meeting days. These small changes can dramatically reduce decision load and create mental bandwidth.

Measuring Attention Span and Mental Clarity

You cannot improve what you do not measure. Tracking your attention span and mental clarity helps you understand your natural focus rhythm and identify when you are at your cognitive peak. Consider the following approaches:

• Attention Tracking Tools: Applications like RescueTime or Focusmate provide data on how much time you spend in deep vs. shallow tasks.
• Energy Mapping: Rate your mental clarity on a scale of 1–10 every hour for a week to pinpoint when your energy naturally peaks and dips.
• Focus Sprints: Set a timer for 25–50 minutes and see how long you can sustain uninterrupted attention. Track improvements over time.
• Reflection Journals: Record moments when distractions or fatigue took over. Identify patterns—like working late after poor sleep or skipping breaks.

When you know your peak focus windows, you can schedule your most demanding work during those periods. For example, if your mental clarity is highest between 8:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m., protect that window for strategic or creative tasks and push routine administrative work to later in the day.

Practical Questions to Ask Yourself

As you analyze your focus and distractions, ask yourself:

• Which tasks consistently move me closer to my long-term goals, and which are merely busywork?
• What triggers cause me to break focus most often—technology, people, or self-interruptions?
• Do I have a predictable daily rhythm, or do I allow external demands to dictate my schedule?
• Am I getting enough rest, exercise, and recovery to maintain sustained focus?

The answers will shape how you design your Focus Funnel’s layers. By having a clear picture of your baseline, you’ll be better equipped to filter out low-value tasks, optimize your environment, and engineer flow states that maximize results.

Designing the Core Layers of Your Focus Funnel

With a clear understanding of your current focus patterns and distractions, the next step is to build the structural backbone of your Focus Funnel. This involves designing the three core layers—Filter, Focus, and Flow—that will allow you to systematically process tasks, shield yourself from interruptions, and work at your cognitive peak. These layers form a sequence: first you filter out low-value work, then you create conditions for uninterrupted focus, and finally you cultivate a flow state where deep, high-quality output becomes effortless.

Filter: Prioritizing High-Impact Tasks

The filter layer is where you separate what truly matters from the noise. Without a reliable filtering process, your time is consumed by reactive tasks instead of meaningful progress. Filtering involves evaluating every input—emails, meetings, to-do list items, or new projects—against your long-term objectives and deciding whether it deserves your energy.

To effectively filter, ask yourself two key questions: “Does this task directly move me toward my main goals?” and “Is this the best use of my current time and energy?” This mental checkpoint prevents you from committing to tasks out of habit, obligation, or fear of missing out.

Applying the Eisenhower Matrix

One proven method for filtering is the Eisenhower Matrix, which categorizes tasks into four quadrants:

• Urgent and Important: Tasks that require immediate action and align with your primary goals (e.g., a project deadline).
• Important but Not Urgent: High-value strategic tasks that drive long-term success but don’t have pressing deadlines (e.g., planning, skill development).
• Urgent but Not Important: Tasks that feel pressing but have little impact on your core priorities (e.g., some emails or last-minute requests).
• Neither Urgent Nor Important: Time-wasting activities that can be delegated, postponed, or eliminated.

Focusing on the “Important but Not Urgent” quadrant ensures that you’re working proactively, not just reactively. By assigning each task to a category, you can quickly decide whether to act, schedule, delegate, or delete it.

Aligning Tasks With Long-Term Goals

A powerful filter goes beyond daily priorities by tying tasks to your overarching vision. To build this connection:

• Identify your top three long-term goals for the next 6–12 months.
• Map each weekly task to one of these goals—or eliminate it if it doesn’t fit.
• Regularly review your priorities to ensure they remain relevant as circumstances change.

This alignment prevents you from chasing tasks that feel urgent but do little to advance your career, business, or personal growth. A well-designed Focus Funnel eliminates 80% of low-value noise, leaving only the 20% of work that generates significant results.

Focus: Creating Distraction-Proof Environments

Once you’ve filtered out nonessential tasks, the next challenge is to create an environment where focus thrives. Even a short burst of deep work can outperform hours of distracted effort, but you need conditions that reduce interruptions and mental clutter.

Setting Up Your Workspace for Deep Work

Your physical and digital workspace shapes your ability to concentrate. A cluttered desk or a screen filled with notifications can sabotage even the best intentions. To set up an environment that promotes focus:

• Keep only the essentials on your desk—remove visual distractions.
• Use tools like website blockers or “Do Not Disturb” modes during deep work sessions.
• Adopt a minimalist digital setup—limit open apps or tabs to what you need for the task at hand.
• Signal your unavailability to others during focus blocks, whether by status updates or physical signs (e.g., headphones).

These simple adjustments reduce the friction of starting and sustaining focus, making it easier to achieve meaningful progress in less time.

Time Blocking and Pomodoro Techniques

Time blocking—scheduling fixed periods of uninterrupted work for your most important tasks—is a core tactic for the Focus layer. By assigning tasks to specific time slots, you create a non-negotiable boundary around your deep work sessions.

The Pomodoro Technique, which involves 25-minute focus sprints followed by 5-minute breaks, is an excellent way to train your brain to work deeply while avoiding burnout. For larger projects, you can extend these sprints to 50–60 minutes, with longer breaks between sessions.

Key principles include:

• Plan your top 1–3 tasks the night before and assign them to your peak focus windows.
• Use timers or apps to track and maintain your focus blocks.
• Treat these blocks like appointments you cannot miss or reschedule.

Flow: Cultivating Peak Performance States

The ultimate goal of the Focus Funnel is to reach “flow”—a mental state where your mind is fully immersed, time feels suspended, and output quality is significantly higher. While flow cannot be forced, you can create conditions that make it more likely to occur.

Leveraging Routines and Rituals

Pre-work rituals reduce the cognitive load of starting important tasks. Simple routines—like reviewing your goals, clearing your workspace, or doing a short mindfulness exercise—signal your brain that it’s time to enter a focused state. Consistency is key; the more predictable your starting routine, the faster you’ll slip into deep work.

Mindfulness and Cognitive Restoration

Flow depends on a rested, calm mind. Practices such as mindfulness meditation, breathing exercises, or even short mental breaks improve attention control and emotional regulation. Cognitive restoration—taking deliberate downtime between intense focus sessions—ensures your brain has the energy needed for high-quality work.

Regular breaks, adequate sleep, and exercise are non-negotiable components of this layer. Without proper recovery, the Focus Funnel collapses under fatigue and stress, no matter how well-designed it is.

By integrating Filter, Focus, and Flow into your daily workflow, you build a personal system that minimizes distraction, maximizes attention, and allows you to produce your best work consistently.

Building Systems and Habits That Reinforce Focus

Designing a Focus Funnel is not a one-time activity—it’s a system that lives and evolves through daily habits and self-sustaining routines. This section explores how to reinforce focus not just through willpower, but by building automatic structures that protect your attention, reduce friction, and support long-term behavioral consistency. Systems and habits are the scaffolding that makes the Focus Funnel durable, even under pressure. When you automate key decisions and standardize high-leverage behaviors, you protect your mental bandwidth for the work that truly matters.

Automating Your Decision-Making

Every decision—no matter how small—consumes cognitive resources. When you manually decide what to focus on, how to begin, or whether to take a break, you invite friction and delay. High performers use automation to reduce decision fatigue and maintain focus under pressure.

Key automation strategies include:

• Predefined Priorities: Establish a short list of 1–3 daily goals each evening so you begin the next day with clarity, not hesitation.
• Fixed Scheduling Blocks: Reserve consistent time slots each day or week for deep work, planning, or admin. This reduces the need to negotiate with your calendar each morning.
• Recurring Routines: Turn recurring tasks into rituals. For example, always review your top priorities right after your first cup of coffee, or always start focus blocks with a workspace reset.
• Workflow Templates: Use checklists or templates for common tasks (e.g., weekly planning, project kickoffs, or reporting). This reduces rethinking and speeds up execution.

By offloading repetitive decisions to systems, you free your mental energy for complex thinking and creative problem-solving.

Creating Rituals That Anchor Deep Work

Rituals act as on-ramps to focus. They help transition your brain out of reactive mode and into a mindset of intentional creation. Unlike routines, which are often passive or utilitarian, rituals are purpose-driven and emotionally anchored. They create a sense of readiness and commitment.

Examples of Effective Pre-Work Rituals

Adopt simple but meaningful steps that help you settle into deep work more quickly:

• Environment Reset: Clear your workspace, silence devices, and launch only the tools you need for the task at hand.
• Mindful Centering: Take three deep breaths, stretch for 60 seconds, or do a short journaling prompt to reset your nervous system.
• Reaffirm Your Why: Quickly revisit your weekly or project goals to connect the task ahead to a broader purpose.
• Same Start Cue: Use a consistent sound, action, or trigger—like a particular playlist or opening a specific document—to mark the beginning of a deep work session.

The goal is not to create complexity but to train your brain to recognize, “It’s time to focus now.” Over time, this anchors focus behavior with less mental effort.

Habit Loops That Support Attention Mastery

Habits are the small hinges that swing big doors. Once installed, a productive habit removes the need for motivation or discipline—it simply runs. Attention-enhancing habits are especially powerful when structured as habit loops: cue → routine → reward.

For example:

• Cue: Finishing your morning coffee.
• Routine: Starting your first 90-minute deep work block.
• Reward: A 10-minute walk, music break, or satisfaction of progress tracked.

To build sustainable focus habits:

• Keep the routine small and consistent at first—build intensity later.
• Attach new habits to existing triggers (e.g., “After I check my calendar, I write my daily top 3”).
• Use a habit tracker to reinforce consistency and visualize momentum.
• Celebrate small wins to wire your brain to crave focus instead of distraction.

Over time, these loops become second nature, helping you transition into focused work without inner resistance.

Using Accountability and Tracking for Sustainability

Even the best-designed system can drift without feedback. Tracking your focus performance and maintaining light accountability ensures your Focus Funnel stays functional over time. This doesn’t mean rigid perfection—it means honest reflection and small course corrections.

Focus Metrics to Track Weekly

Review your week with these focus-relevant metrics:

• Deep Work Hours: Total hours spent in uninterrupted, high-cognition work.
• Top 3 Completion Rate: How often you complete your daily top three priorities.
• Distraction Frequency: Number of times you self-interrupt or check unrelated apps during focus blocks.
• Recovery Score: Sleep quality, break frequency, or stress level trends.

Use this data not to judge yourself, but to iterate your system. For example, if your deep work hours are low, examine whether you’re protecting focus blocks or allowing unfiltered tasks back into the funnel.

Leveraging Accountability Structures

Social accountability can dramatically increase follow-through. Consider:

• Partnering with a peer to share daily or weekly goals.
• Using tools like shared check-ins, group focus sessions, or weekly summaries.
• Posting your progress in a private group or journal—even if no one else reads it.

Just the act of committing to your priorities out loud reinforces your intention and strengthens your execution muscle.

By embedding your Focus Funnel in repeatable systems and habits, you create a sustainable engine for distraction-free work. These structures eliminate the need to “get motivated” every day and replace it with consistency, clarity, and calm productivity.

Implementing Distraction‑Elimination Strategies

Designing a Focus Funnel is only effective if you actively strip away the noise that keeps stealing your time. This section gives you practical, battle‑tested strategies to shut down digital overwhelm, rewire unhelpful behaviors, and engineer environments—both physical and virtual—that make focus your default. You’ll learn how to run a sustainable digital detox, deploy small behavioral levers that compound, and reshape your surroundings so distractions have nowhere to hide.

Digital Detox: Managing Notifications and Apps

Digital devices aren’t inherently the problem—the problem is unfiltered access to your attention. A structured digital detox helps you reclaim control without abandoning the tools you rely on.

• Notification Triage: Turn off all nonessential push notifications. Keep only mission‑critical alerts (e.g., calendar reminders, emergency contacts).
• Batch Communication: Check email, chat, and social media at predefined windows (e.g., 11:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.) instead of “as they come in.”
• Use App Limits and Website Blockers: Set time caps or blocklists during focus blocks to prevent automatic tab surfing.
• Single‑Task Mode: Keep only one “work context” open—one document, one browser window, one project board.
• Clean Your Home Screen: Remove or hide distraction-heavy apps from your phone’s first screen to reduce reflexive tapping.
• Weekly Digital Cleanups: Unsubscribe from newsletters you never read, archive stale chats, and close dormant project tabs.

The aim is to make your devices serve your priorities—not the other way around.

Behavioral Hacks for Better Concentration

While environment and tools matter, your behaviors create the real leverage. Small, low-friction practices can dramatically reduce context switching and improve execution consistency.

Habit Stacking for Sustained Focus

Habit stacking attaches a new focus behavior to an existing, consistent action—minimizing friction and increasing follow‑through. Examples:

• After I open my laptop, I write my top three priorities for the day.
• After my first coffee, I start a 50‑minute deep work block.
• After each meeting ends, I take 2 minutes to document next actions and schedule them.

Keep stacks tiny at first. The goal is momentum, not intensity. Once the loop is reliable, increase the duration or depth of your focus blocks.

Accountability Partners and Peer Pressure

External accountability raises the cost of distraction and increases the likelihood of follow‑through. You don’t need a complex system—just a simple structure that makes your commitments visible.

• Weekly Goal Sharing: Share your top three outcomes for the week with a peer and report back on Friday.
• Live Focus Sessions: Use virtual co‑working or scheduled deep work sessions to create time‑boxed pressure.
• Progress Logs: Public or private tracking (spreadsheets, journals, dashboards) helps you see trend lines—motivation grows with visible progress.
• Micro‑Commitments: Declare one non‑negotiable task each day to your partner—then deliver.

The goal isn’t perfection; it’s consistent visibility that nudges you back on track when distractions creep in.

Environment Design: Physical and Virtual

Your environment should reduce decision fatigue, cut off easy distractions, and make deep work frictionless. Design it once—then let it work for you every day.

• Physical Minimalism: Keep your desk clear. Store reference materials out of sight. Remove items that invite multitasking.
• Dedicated Zones: If possible, use separate spaces for deep work, admin work, and rest. Physical separation reinforces mental mode shifts.
• Sound Management: Noise‑canceling headphones, focus playlists, or ambient sounds can shield you from interruptions.
• Virtual Clean Room: Create a “focus desktop” or a separate user profile with only essential apps and files.
• Pre‑Configured Focus Sessions: Save browser tab sets or project-specific workspaces so you can start deep work instantly without setup drag.
• Status Signals: Use clear, visible indicators—calendar blocks, status messages, or physical signs—to tell others you’re unavailable.

When you control the inputs of your environment, you reduce the need for extra willpower. The simplest path becomes the focused path.

Together, these distraction‑elimination strategies strengthen every layer of your Focus Funnel. By cutting noise at the source—digitally, behaviorally, and environmentally—you free up the cognitive space required for meaningful, high‑impact work.

Prioritizing High‑Impact Work and Energy Management

A Focus Funnel is meaningless unless you know what truly deserves your attention. This section explores how to identify high-impact tasks, structure your day around peak energy, and make deliberate trade-offs that maximize meaningful progress. The key is not working more hours but aligning your energy with your most valuable work while eliminating or delegating low-value tasks that drain focus without real results.

The 80/20 Rule and Task Filtering

The Pareto Principle, or 80/20 rule, reveals that a small percentage of actions often create the majority of outcomes. For knowledge workers, this translates into pinpointing the few tasks that drive 80% of progress and filtering out the rest. Applying this principle transforms your Focus Funnel from a reactive task list into a high-impact roadmap.

• Identify Output Drivers: Ask, “Which 20% of tasks or projects, if completed, would create 80% of the impact this week or month?”
• Audit Your Calendar: Look for recurring meetings or commitments that don’t align with your strategic goals.
• Group Tasks by Impact: Categorize tasks as high, medium, or low impact, and eliminate or delegate the low-value items.
• Apply the ‘One Thing’ Question: “What’s the one task I can do today that will make everything else easier or unnecessary?”

Task filtering is not about ignoring responsibilities; it’s about intentionally narrowing your focus to the few levers that move the needle.

Energy‑Aligned Scheduling

Peak productivity comes not from working nonstop, but from doing the right work at the right time. Aligning your schedule with your energy levels ensures that your most demanding tasks are handled when your brain is at its sharpest.

Finding Your Biological Prime Time

Your body follows natural rhythms—often referred to as circadian and ultradian rhythms—that influence alertness, focus, and creativity. To find your prime focus window:

• Track your energy patterns for one to two weeks. Note when you feel sharp, creative, or sluggish.
• Block your top focus hours for deep, high-impact tasks—usually mornings for many people, but everyone’s rhythms differ.
• Reserve lower-energy times for shallow tasks like admin, email, or quick check-ins.

By aligning your daily schedule with your biological prime time, you reduce resistance and can achieve more in less time.

Micro‑Breaks and Recovery Cycles

Focus is a finite resource. Just as muscles need rest after a workout, your brain needs micro-breaks to restore focus and prevent cognitive fatigue.

• Ultradian Rhythm Breaks: After 90 minutes of deep work, take a 5–15 minute break to reset your mental energy.
• Active Recovery: Walk, stretch, or do a quick breathing exercise instead of scrolling your phone.
• Midday Reset: A short break or lunch away from screens can dramatically improve afternoon performance.

Strategic breaks prevent burnout and keep the Focus Funnel running smoothly.

Defining and Protecting Your “Big 3” Priorities

Every day, a handful of actions contribute the most to your long-term success. The “Big 3” method involves choosing no more than three high-impact outcomes per day—tasks that, if completed, make your day a win regardless of anything else.

• Evening Planning: Define your Big 3 the night before to start the next day with clarity.
• Morning Check‑In: Begin your day by committing to these outcomes, not by reacting to your inbox.
• Time Boxing: Allocate dedicated blocks to each priority, ensuring they’re done before lower-value tasks creep in.
• End-of-Day Review: Reflect on progress and adjust tomorrow’s priorities based on outcomes.

The Big 3 method ensures that you’re always moving forward on what matters most, rather than getting trapped in “busy work.”

Delegating and Automating Low‑Value Tasks

You cannot focus on high-value work if you’re bogged down by repetitive, low-impact activities. Delegation and automation are essential levers for reclaiming mental space and time.

• Identify Non-Core Tasks: List out tasks that don’t require your expertise or creativity (e.g., routine reporting, scheduling).
• Delegate Effectively: Clearly define the outcome, deadline, and resources needed when passing a task to someone else.
• Automate Repetitive Work: Use software tools for invoicing, reminders, social media scheduling, or data entry.
• Batch and Template: Create templates or batch repetitive work into focused time slots instead of handling them ad hoc.

By eliminating or outsourcing non-critical tasks, you preserve your attention for high-value activities that align with your long-term goals.

Mastering prioritization and energy management ensures that your Focus Funnel doesn’t just keep you busy but drives meaningful, results-focused action. By identifying the few tasks that matter, aligning them with your peak energy, and removing the rest, you create a system where every ounce of focus is spent on work that moves you forward.