Focus, Progress, Success

We default to measuring success by wealth, accolades or status, but those scales are as subjective as they are seductive. A long walk worth of introspection, can uncover one’s definition of success, which is basically what makes you happy. It could be Scrooge McDuck level riches to swim in, or simply being in great health at age 90. Mine is accumulating amazing dinner stories that get begged to be repeated as I sit for dinner, surrounded by friends and family to share them with.

Meaningful progress toward success tends to come in two ways:

Plain old luck. You could win the lottery (however slim the odds), the love of your life happens to be your neighbour, or you could have bought 100 bitcoins a decade ago as a joke. Second, doing 'hard things', which is different from hard work and requires sustained focus over long durations of time, and courage.

In my own struggle to maintain focus on hard things, I discovered three things.

a. Our vantage point is not high enough. We rarely look far into the future. Fear and uncertainty lead us to shrinking our horizon to months or weeks. Even when we try to think long-term, we rarely account for compounding factors. We default to linear thinking, which defeats the purpose.

b. There’s no daily forcing function that pushes us to make tradeoffs. We just keep piling initiatives onto our list: The easy wins, the short-term ROI tasks, and the things that feel urgent in the moment, but wouldn’t survive a second glance. This is perhaps the biggest problem; Finding a way to really force ourselves to prioritise what actually matters on a daily basis, not just at the quarterly planning or for new year resolutions.

c. You can just NOT do things. The opposite of the now-hot Silicon Valley phrase, ‘you can just do things,’ is equally applicable to our lives. So much of what we do is out of sheer pressure from what we think society expects from us (society couldn't care less). We add social obligations built around fluff, like attending a gathering just to be polite or watching the latest TV show so we can join the office water-cooler conversation.

In my attempt to improve my focus I tried all the trendy to-do apps like Notion, ToDoist and popular techniques like time-boxing, but focus remained tantalisingly out of reach. Almost all the apps pushed me to add, track, and get notified. Things that drive engagement metrics. Their goals, not mine. A clear misalignment of interests.

My take, which might sound harsh, but truth often is; all of them are procrastination enablers dressed up as organization.

All the apps I tried nudged me to add more. None forced me to choose less. That’s when I realized the tool I needed wasn’t another ML-reinforced productivity tracker, but something radically simpler. A way to force focus the way meditation does: not by doing more, but by returning to what matters. Again and again.

It really clicked when I joined my current company and took charge of their latest product which was their most complex one yet. The team had been building a product for over two years and were still in beta, incurring tech debt. The key to getting the product launched ended up being the moment when I wrote down 5 priorities on the board and refused to do anything but those for almost 16 months, despite pressure from every side. Repeating that list of 5 priorities every two weeks in the all-hands. It became a running joke of how obsessed I was with those priorities, but I stayed stubborn. This got us to ship the basics and start our growth.

A limited list, one that did not make room for short term wins or distractions was the key.

This wasn’t something I dreamed up one day, rather I was inspired by two stories.

One from Keith Rabois, about Peter Thiel’s management style — where he required that everyone be tasked with exactly one priority. He would refuse to discuss virtually anything else with his people except what was currently assigned as their #1 initiative. Even the annual review forms in 2001 required each employee to identify their single most valuable contribution to the company.

The other is told by Jony Ive about Steve Jobs. One of the things Steve would say to Jony, because he was worried he wasn’t focused — Steve would say ‘how many things have you said no to?’

Jony would tell him ‘I said no to this. And I said no to that.’

But Steve knew Jony wasn’t interested in doing those things. There was no sacrifice in saying no.

What focus means is saying no to something that with every bone in your body you think is a phenomenal idea, you wake up thinking about it, but you say no to it because you are focusing on something else.

That lesson stuck with me. Focus isn’t about doing more — it’s about enforced trade-offs, saying no even to great ideas. Our instinct is always to add more, but every addition dilutes focus. I wanted a way to bring that discipline into my own daily life. That’s when the idea for my app took shape.

And thanks to AI, I could finally build an app on this simple principle: restrict the to-do list itself. This forces a trade-off every single time you want to add something new. The core feature is that it only allows you to have five items on your list at a time. That is it.

I think of it as applying the centuries old meditation practice to our work and personal life. When we meditate we bring back our focus to our breath, and in the case of this app, we bring back our focus to the truly important tasks, again and again.

I would love for you to try it out and let me know your thoughts and a 5 star rating. I guarantee, it will help, if not, the next time we meet, coffee is on me. 'Focus: To Do'.

The app is relatively small, just about 3K lines of code, but it carries a big principle: focus isn’t about adding more, it’s about returning, again and again, to what matters most. Please don’t use it for grocery lists :D.