While I Was Writing Today’s Signal // Noise:

🎧 Want the whole vibe? The running playlist is right here.

From sound to signal, let’s get this baby rolling with what’s on my mind…

One big idea, insight, or take - grounded in the real work, not theory.

In the fall of 2024, when I was still CEO of Hampton, I spent every Saturday morning at the Elite Sports Factory, watching my son in the batting cages, fielding grounders, taking baseball workshops.

It wasn’t comfortable, that’s for sure — ninety minutes on a cold hard stool, crowded against a cadre of anxious helicopter parents and wannabe coaches.

But I started to realize, slowly, that every time I brought and opened my laptop, I got more done in that hour and a half than I could get done on your average Wednesday.

Just uninterrupted and focused time.

So on the way home one day, I had a brutal thought:

If even half my weekdays looked like that, my entire role and focus would have changed.

Now I’ve realized just how much of that thought was backed up by actual research:

And… this was exactly my life for 2+ years.

Actually, for probably twenty years, I opened email before I even drank a first cup of coffee or opened my brain.

Then Slack arrived and didn’t replace email — it just layered a new obsession on top of the old one.

Before long, and without noticing the change, I was spending more time reacting than creating.

That was the start of what I now call the Founder Attention Recession — the slow erosion of cognitive bandwidth caused by tiny, nonstop interruptions that make you feel productive while actually pulling you away from the work that matters.

It didn’t feel dramatic at the time. It just felt… busy.

But the real cost showed up everywhere: fewer clean-thinking hours, slower decisions, more stress, and a team who’d learned to funnel everything back to me because I always responded.

Next week, in Part 2, I’ll walk through the same diagnostic I used to get a brutally honest view of my own attention — and why founders consistently misjudge where their hours go.

Then Part 3 digs into the biggest culprit I discovered firsthand: over-availability, poor team comms, and the simple systems that finally pulled me out of it.

Smart reads, sharp tools, or internet gems.

This article blew my mind in a few ways by nailing three uncomfortable truths:

(1) Your devs might feel faster with AI, but the data says otherwise. Actually, a 40% delta. Which means you cannot rely on self-reported “improvements”.

(2) AI turns teams into feature factories unless someone is brutally focused on user experience and real outcomes.

(3) The winners aren’t obsessing over front-end “AI magic,” they’re rebuilding the plumbing — the workflows, data pipes, back-end junk that makes AI actually useful.

If you don’t know what matters, AI just helps you ship the wrong stuff faster. Check it out here.

Thanks to the Collab Fund, came across this wild artifact: a 1972 letter Warren Buffett wrote right after buying See’s Candies. It’s basically a love letter to premium positioning. He tells the team not to chase volume, not to sit next to cheap candy, and even gives a few marketing tips about geographic uniqueness. Pretty effing cool. Check it out here.

I’ve used Upwork forever, but a thread in a founder community I’m in dropped three alternatives I haven’t used yet. They’re worth poking at if you’re hiring globally.

If Upwork feels like the Wild West, these three are a bit more narrow in their focus.

If you can relate to the attention recession, lemme know, what’s the biggest attention leak in your world right now?

Reply with one sentence of the biggest distraction.

And until next time, thanks for reading.

Jordan

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