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.

After I ran my attention audit in Part 2, I couldn’t unsee the pattern.

I wasn’t overwhelmed because the company was chaotic (every startup is) or because people weren’t doing their jobs. I was overwhelmed because I’d accidentally begun to make myself the default answer to everything.

Every Slack “quick question,” every gray-area decision, every moment of uncertainty eventually found its way to me.

For a long time, I told myself that was just good leadership.

I was available, responsive, helpful.

But here’s what I learned the hard way:

Not all at once. Gradually. Decision-making starts to drift upward. People sometimes stop thinking first and start asking first. And before you realize it, the entire org is orbiting your calendar. Availability becomes a bottleneck disguised as generosity.

There’s research behind this. HBR and MIT have both shown that constant access to leaders increases anxiety and reduces autonomy.

When the CEO replies in minutes, the organization learns something dangerous: don’t decide, just check.

You don’t scale judgment that way, in a way you scale dependency.

Fixing this isn’t about caring less or being distant. It’s about being intentional with your time and attention. So instead of trying to “be less available,” I rebuilt how availability worked entirely. I put a new operating system in place. Not because I love process, but because I was tired of being the human router system.

The biggest change wasn’t fewer meetings. It was fewer interruptions.

Weekly updates moved out of meetings and into a simple async cadence:

the GROW Report.

Every Friday by 10am ET, my direct reports send a short update covering Goals, Results, Obstacles, and What’s Next. No decks. Just enough signal to stay aligned without hovering.

Probably took each of my direct reports 10 minutes to create.

That shift alone removed a shocking amount of noise. I stayed informed without micromanaging. They stayed autonomous without guessing. And suddenly, nobody needed to “grab time” just to feel aligned.

1:1s didn’t disappear. They got better. If someone wants time, awesome. Schedule it. But come prepared. What’s the goal of the conversation? What context matters? What decision are we trying to land? Thirty focused minutes beats sixty meandering ones every time.

The final piece was teaching the team how to communicate and escalate decisions without defaulting to me. Once everyone shared the same expectations around when to inform, when to recommend, and when to decide independently, the constant pings stopped feeling necessary.

The thing that surprised me the most was that I got better information through the written medium, and I think people made better decisions without me. Stress went down across the board.

Ambiguity can be exhausting for a team, but in general, structure is calming.

And if Part 2 was about seeing where your attention is leaking, this is the part where you actually fix it. Not by working harder or being more disciplined, but by designing your availability like the scarce, valuable resource it actually is.

That’s the real shift.

Smart reads, sharp tools, or internet gems.

One of the most famous internal templates ever. Bezos banned slide decks and forced teams to write six-page narrative memos instead, which resulted in clearer thinking, fewer meetings, better decisions. If your org lives in decks and confusion, steal this immediately. Check it out here.

One of the clearest takes on delegation you’ll read. Jason Cohen hits the sweet spot between high-level mindset and practical pitfalls: why most delegation fails, how to think about ownership ( not just tasks ), and the structures that make it stick. Check it out here.

Matt Mochary (legendary CEO coach, worked with Coinbase, Brex, etc.) breaks down how most leaders misuse 1:1s and why structure matters more than frequency. And an interesting move from individual 1:1s to group 1:1 experiments. Check it out here.

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Hope everyone has a great weekend.

And until next time, thanks for reading.

Jordan

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