The art of tuning out the noise and amplifying the signal to ship what matters.
TL:DR
1. Make a list of things you have to do(It’s called a to-do list)
2. Filter them into two categories; (signal and noise);
3. Commit to executing those in the signal category
Everyone I know has a to-do list, not all of them use them. You probably have one. I have one. I’ve had several scattered across Microsoft To Do, Sticky notes, WhatsApp messages to myself, and the latest addition is Obsidian. The problem was never making the list. The problem was that I was treating every item on that list as if it weighed the same. I didn’t hierarchically rank them nor rate them in order of importance; they were just things to tick off as I completed them. As if posting on LinkedIn held the same gravity as solving a critical bug in the Intelli app.
It doesn’t.
And in the wake of AI, where every tool promises to make you 10x more productive, the real question you should be asking yourself is does speed of completing tasks necessarily equate to productivity? What is productivity? McKinsey defines it in the simplest terms : productivity is a measure of output relative to input. This thus means that for you to be productive you have to tend towards efficiency by using the littlest inputs (time, labour, capital/money, materials) to produce the most outputs (goods, services, products).
This doesn’t mean that for you to be productive you should avoid hard work, or sweat but rather produce more out of your sweat than is normal.
Now that we have established the foundation. Let’s discuss direction. You can move incredibly fast and still end up nowhere meaningful. I’ve watched this happen. I’ve been this person.
So here’s the framework I’ve come to live by. It’s simple; three steps but the discipline it demands is where the magic (and the pain) dwells.
1. Make the List
Write it all down. Every single thing competing for your attention. The bugs you need to fix. The emails you need to send. The feature requests from users. The investor update. The groceries you need to shop. The gym session you’ve been postponing for two weeks. That blog post idea. All of it. The reason why you write is to get out of your head. It can get messy in there.
The goal here is not only organization (making sure you neatly array your to-dos in order of priority), but it’s also to externalize (The act of making internal ideas, thoughts, or emotions visible to others including yourself, by way of writing them down on paper, to better understand or process them)
You need to get everything out of your head and onto a surface where you can see it. Your brain can work like a storage device and a processor simultaneously. It’s an incredible processor, but has a different function from our known hard drives, in that it can persist a thought/memory/idea in it’s RAM if deemed important or necessary but with time or when the element of surprise is introduced that memory/file/idea will start to deprecate and become altered, what really happened is the brain updated, edited and re-saved the memory with some missing details or removed some things; that’s why when people are interrupted mid-speech they say “I lost my train of thought.”
When you try to hold 47 things in working memory, and in a busy work/office environment where your colleagues and everything else demands your attention as much as your work you end up context-switching between all of them and executing none of them well. In this context-switching you will be stuck in a continuous loop using up your processor power without actually executing or successfully completing anything.
Stephen R. Covey understood and articulated this well in his book: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, particularly Habit 3 ; Put First Things First. Covey draws a critical distinction between things that are urgent and things that are important. Most people live in the quadrant of urgent-but-not-important. The phone buzzing. The Slack notification. The “quick call” that eats 45 minutes. These things feel productive because they demand immediate attention. But demanding attention and deserving attention are two very different things.
So step one is simply: get honest about everything that’s on your plate. Don’t cherry-pick. Don’t judge yet before you clearly lay it out.
2. Filter into Signal and Noise
This is where it gets uncomfortable and difficult.
Once you have your list, you split it into two categories: Signal and Noise.
Signal is anything that moves the needle. It’s the work that, if you did it consistently for the next 90 days, would fundamentally change your trajectory. For me at Intelli right now, signal looks like: shipping our campaign management flow, getting WhatsApp template creation bulletproof, onboarding our first 1000 paying customers, and making sure our API integrations don’t break under load.
Noise is everything else. And here’s the part that stings, noise isn’t necessarily bad. It’s not spam or trash. Noise includes perfectly reasonable tasks that simply don’t deserve your best hours. When I say your best hours I mean the time your brain is at it’s peak of operation in terms of compute power and isn’t yet overwhelmed with numerous attention demanding requests. Redesigning a settings page nobody visits yet. Attending a networking event “just in case.” Writing documentation for a feature that’s not yet even released. Coming up with a new architecture for the app. These are all legitimate and wonderful tasks to work on. But they’re not signal. Atleast not right now.
Covey’s Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind is essentially this filter in principle form. If you don’t know what your “end” looks like, everything feels equally important. But the moment you define what success actually looks like for you and your company this quarter, this month, this week, suddenly the noise reveals itself. You start seeing how many hours you’ve been spending on Quadrant III (urgent but not important) and Quadrant IV (neither urgent nor important) activities while the Quadrant II work the deep, important, non-urgent work that actually compounds, collects dust in the corner.
I think of it like this: if you’ve ever watched Eliud Kipchoge run a marathon, you’ll notice he doesn’t react to every surge from the pack. He runs his race. He has a pace strategy, and he commits to it. The runners who react to every move from the competition burn out by the 30km mark. Kipchoge runs steady, maintains his cadence and follows his strategy as laid out before the race. That’s what filtering for signal does. It reserves your energy and strength for the moments that actually count.
Now, AI has made this filtering both easier and harder. Easier because tools like Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw and various agents can handle a lot of the noise for you; drafting and replying emails, fixing bugs, writing PRs, reviewing PRs, scaffolding codebases, summarizing or generating documents, among others. Harder because the sheer volume of what you could do has exploded. When AI can help you do 20 things in the time it used to take to do 5, the temptation is to do all 20. But 15 of those things might still be noise. Moving faster through noise is still noise. It’s just faster noise.
The discipline in 2026 and beyond isn’t just learning to use AI. Everyone interested in keeping their job and staying relevant will eventually learn that. The discipline is learning what not to do, even when AI makes it trivially easy and very tempting to do.
3. Commit to Executing Signal
This is the final step that is very easy to gloss over. You can make the list. You can proceed to filter the list into signal and noise. But commitment real, stubborn, I’m-not-doing-anything-else-until-this-is-done commitment that’s the missing ingredient. And to throw more light on this; I will explain with the quote below.
My father loves and uses proverbs to convey lessons about wisdom; one he frequently uses often is
“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink”
The modification he made with this proverb is he substituted a horse with a goat because of their mulish nature but also because we had so cows and goats at home and we often were tasked with herding them. This idiom/proverb is closer to home because goats often refused to be dragged to go eat grass or drink water at the watering hole; and even when we did go through the high waters to bring them to the well, we couldn’t force neither make them to drink the water or eat the grass.
Stephen R. Covey’s Habit 1 Be Proactive is foundational here. Being proactive doesn’t mean being a busybody or jumping up to take up every task that is present to you. It means taking charge, responsibility and ownership of your response to circumstances. It means when the noise comes knocking (and it will, loudly, and every single day), you have the internal clarity to say: “Not now. I’m executing on signal.”
I’ve learned this the hard way building Intelli. There was a time where I’d end the week having been “busy” every single day with meetings, Slack threads, WhatsApp group messages, PR reviews, debugging edge cases in our Meta API integration and yet the core milestone hadn’t moved. I was active but not effective. Productive but not performant. There’s a difference, in the two and it lies in how efficient I was in accomplishing the required/necessary tasks.
When you commit to executing the signal, you also have to accept something uncomfortable: you will disappoint people. You will leave messages unread for a few hours. You will decline meetings. You will say “not yet” to features that users are asking for. And you will feel guilty about it until you realize that the people who build things that last are the ones who had the courage to protect their attention. Attention especially in the age of information overload has become heavily commoditised and I see that the proliferation of AI will only make this worse.
Covey talks about Habit 7 Sharpen the Saw as the habit of renewal. I look at it as a habit of preparation and I think this ties directly into sustainable execution. You can’t white-knuckle your way through signal tasks 16 hours a day and expect quality output. The saw gets dull. Your mind gets dull. I’ve been in those late-night debugging sessions where I spent 4–6 hours chasing a bug that I solved in 15 minutes the next morning after sleeping. Adequate rest is very necessary to prime your body and mind to be able to operate at your optimal state and execute signal. Recovery is fundamental to preparing your body and mind to become ready for the next opportunity that presents itself to you. The two (Rest and Recovery) are the key ingredients that make high-signal execution possible. A prepared man is the right man in the window and time of opportunity to show forth his experience and skill.
The AI Angle
Here’s what I’ll leave you with.
AI didn’t change what it means to be effective. The principles Covey wrote about in 1989 are just as true now as they were then. What AI changed is the speed at which you can execute and the volume of options available to you. And with greater speed and volume comes not a greater need for speed but clarity.( See what I did there? 😉)
The most damaging/detrimental version of yourself in the wake of AI isn’t the one who’s slow. It’s the one who’s fast but unfocused and without direction. The one who uses AI to generate 10 versions of a new feature before validating whether the feature even matters or is needed. The one who automates workflows for a product nobody uses yet.
So make your list. Be honest about what’s on it. Filter ruthlessly; signal on one side, noise on the other. And then commit, with everything you’ve got in you, to the signal. Let AI handle the noise. Let AI accelerate the signal. But you decide which is which.
This the way. That’s always been the way.
If this resonated, you can find more of my writing on Substack. I write about building in Africa, my perspective on AI, startups, and the things nobody tells you about shipping product.