This week, my primary development focus wasn’t on a production line at JvG Technology or a marketing automation sequence at Mehrklicks. It was on the system that precedes all other work: my attention.
I started with a simple diagnostic. On Monday morning, I had 137 unread emails, 42 Slack notifications across three workspaces, and seven data dashboards all vying for my review. This isn’t a sign of importance; it’s a symptom of a design flaw. The default state of our digital world is a firehose aimed squarely at our consciousness.
For years, I treated this as a productivity problem to be solved with more discipline or faster processing. I was wrong. It’s a systems architecture problem. My mind, like any critical server, needs a firewall—not to block everything, but to intelligently filter incoming packets of information before they consume processing power.
The Hidden Tax on a Founder’s Focus
We intuitively know that interruptions are costly, but the research is staggering. Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, found it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to a task after an interruption. When I mapped this to my Monday morning, the potential to lose hours of deep, strategic work before the day had truly begun was alarming.
This isn’t just about lost time; it’s about cognitive degradation. One famous study claimed that the constant interruptions from emails and texts could lower a person’s effective IQ by 10 points. Every notification, unread email, and „quick question“ is a micro-decision. Roy Baumeister’s research on „decision fatigue“ shows we have a finite amount of quality decision-making energy each day. When we spend it triaging a chaotic inbox, we deplete the very resource needed for the high-stakes decisions that actually move a business forward.
The problem isn’t the information itself; it’s the lack of a system to manage its entry. So, I started designing one. I call it my Information Firewall.
The Architecture of an Information Firewall
A network firewall uses rules to control incoming and outgoing traffic. My system applies the same logic to information. It’s built on three core principles: defining the ports, setting the rules, and using tools to automate enforcement.
Principle 1: Define the Ports (The Entry Points)
First, I identified the main „ports“ through which information tries to enter my workspace. For me, they are:
- Email: External communication, formal internal updates, and automated reports.
- Instant Messaging (Slack/Teams): Real-time internal collaboration.
- News & Industry Updates: General market awareness and learning.
- Data & Dashboards: Project and business performance metrics.
Just naming them was a critical first step. It transforms a vague sense of being overwhelmed into a series of distinct, manageable channels.
Principle 2: Set the Rules (The Triage Logic)
Here lies the core of the system. Each port gets a strict, non-negotiable set of rules governing how information is processed.
Port 1: Email
The goal for email is not „inbox zero“—that’s a vanity metric. The goal is „inbox processed.“ My rule is simple: I process email twice a day, once in the late morning and once at the end of the day. Using an automation tool that acts as a smart filter, emails are pre-sorted into three categories:
- Reply Now: Urgent and important items that require my direct input (less than 5% of emails).
- The Digest: Newsletters and non-urgent updates, bundled into a single daily email for review.
- The Archive: Receipts, notifications, and anything that doesn’t require a reply. These are automatically archived, searchable if needed.
This system is about building a second brain that handles the sorting externally, so my own mind doesn’t have to. The cognitive load of deciding what to do with 100+ emails is offloaded to the system.
Port 2: Instant Messaging
Slack is the most dangerous port because it creates an illusion of urgency. My rule is asynchronous by default.
- Notifications are off. All of them. The red dot is the enemy of deep work.
- I check it in scheduled blocks, just like email.
- My teams know that if something is truly on fire, they should call me. In a decade of running businesses, this has happened maybe three times. The „urgent“ rarely is.
Port 3: News & Social Media
I don’t „browse“ the news. That’s an invitation for algorithmic control over my attention. Instead, I use an RSS reader (Feedly) to pull information, not have it pushed on me.
- I subscribe to a curated list of high-signal sources.
- I read during a designated time, usually over coffee or during lunch.
- No infinite scroll, no trending topics, no outrage bait. The system delivers only what I asked for.
This approach changes the dynamic. Instead of being a passive consumer of a chaotic feed, I become the active curator of my own intelligence briefing. It’s a subtle shift that echoes a broader philosophy of mine: the recognition of why I stopped setting goals in favor of designing systems. The goal isn’t to „be more informed“; the system is designed to consume high-quality information efficiently.
Port 4: Data & Dashboards
I love data, but I used to check dashboards compulsively. This was a classic founder trap—mistaking activity for progress. My rule now is scheduled reviews and exception-based alerts.
- I review core KPIs for each business in one 30-minute block each week.
- For critical operational metrics (like server uptime or production line output), I have automated alerts that notify me only if a metric goes outside a predefined range.
I don’t need to know if everything is okay. I only need to know when it isn’t.
Principle 3: Automate the Enforcement
The final layer is using tools to make these rules the path of least resistance. This includes:
- SaneBox to automatically filter and categorize my email.
- Slack’s scheduled „Do Not Disturb“ to enforce my check-in times.
- Feedly to aggregate my news inputs into one place.
The specific tools are less important than the principle: build the system, then use automation to make adherence effortless. This is fundamental to how to scale a business without adding headcount—applying system leverage to your most precious resource: your own attention.
The Result: From Reactive Triage to Proactive Strategy
Implementing this firewall hasn’t been about blocking the world out. It’s been about creating space for focused thought.
The chaos of a reactive morning has been replaced by a calm, structured engagement with the world. Time once spent on low-value sorting is now dedicated to strategic planning, process design, and mentoring my teams. The decision fatigue that used to set in by early afternoon is gone, leaving more energy for the complex challenges that actually require my full cognitive horsepower.
This isn’t just about personal productivity; it’s a model for organizational sanity. When a founder’s attention is fragmented, the entire organization feels it. When a founder’s attention is protected and directed, that focus cascades, creating clarity and momentum for everyone.
Frequently Asked Questions
What if something truly urgent gets missed by the firewall?
This is the most common concern. My system has an „escape hatch“ for true emergencies: the phone call. I make it clear to my direct reports and key partners that if a situation is a genuine, time-sensitive crisis, they should call me. This serves two purposes: it ensures true emergencies get through, and it forces the sender to ask, „Is this important enough to interrupt him with a phone call?“ In 99.9% of cases, the answer is no.
How do you get your team to adapt to your new communication rules?
You don’t implement a system like this in a vacuum; you communicate the „why“ behind it. I explained to my teams that this system allows me to give them my full, undivided attention for the high-level problems they need my help with. Instead of getting a distracted, 30-second Slack reply, they get focused input during my scheduled blocks. It’s all about setting clear expectations. An operating manual for how to work with you is a powerful tool.
Isn’t this just another complicated system to manage?
It can feel that way for the first week. But the goal is to front-load the design work to massively reduce daily cognitive load. It takes a few hours to set up the rules and tools, but it saves you from making hundreds of tiny, draining decisions every single day. Once it’s built, the system runs on autopilot.
How long did it take to see results?
The initial sense of calm was immediate. The first day I didn’t open my email until 11 AM felt revolutionary. The true, measurable results—in terms of project velocity and strategic clarity—became apparent within a couple of weeks. It’s an iterative process; I still tweak the rules every month or so as projects and priorities shift. The system is alive, just like the businesses it helps run.
