How I Cut 90% of Distractions and Got My Focus Back
In this informal, profanity‑laden workshop Jeff Miller walks a small audience through a practical application of the Eisenhower Matrix to reclaim focus. He asks participants to label tasks by urgency and importance, illustrating each of the four quadrants with real‑world examples—from Slack notifications and promotional emails (high urgency, low importance) to writing a book or family time (high importance, low urgency) and sales calls or health emergencies (high importance, high urgency). Miller emphasizes delegating or eliminating low‑importance urgent items, building SOPs and templates to automate recurring requests, and completely deleting junk. He critiques the constant digital barrage of notifications, explains how it hijacks the brain’s survival response, and suggests mental boundaries and accountability coaching to shift tasks into more productive buckets. Throughout, he stresses that recognizing where “shiny objects” (new business ideas) sit in the matrix prevents burnout and helps sustain long‑term success.
Chapters
After I get 5 to 10 testimonials, case studies, gone through this rotation a few times, yeah.
So, Brandon, a question outside but still related to this. How do you stay focused on just this thing instead of other things? Like, we talk about shiny objects and
stuff. Yeah, well done. How
do you stay so focused on it?
Well fucking done, you're reading my mind. Anybody know the Eisenhower Matrix? Yes. Tell me about it.
It's urgent, sensitive, important, and fun. Urgent, delegate, and delete.
Anybody seen this before? I think so, yeah. Something like that, right? Here's like a very easy way of organizing your day. So you've got urgency, and you've got importance. I want everyone to yell really fast, how many things throughout their day are urgent? Is everything urgent? Everything is fucking urgent all the goddamn time, right? All the time. Look at your phone, everything is urgent. There's reds and blues because people are most urgently responsive to those.
Client complaints.
Say what?
Client complaints.
Client complaints. Slack goes off, you're like, ah, this fucking sucks. Even if it's not that big of a deal, our inherent response is very urgent. Right over here, this line. Most times they're not important, or most times they are important?
Not important.
Not important at all. Would you say the vast majority of urgent things are not important? Like 90% of them, right? So they would go under here. Mentally, in a bucket, in the chart and graph, this is how you should be thinking about your day. Is my stuff important? Is my stuff urgent? Low important, high urgency, what do you do with this bucket?
Delegate it.
You could delegate it or you could just fucking ignore it like I do. Eliminate it. Yeah, say what? You eliminate it. You can get rid of it, that's fucking right. If somebody is messaging you non-important, highly urgent things, chances are you can just ignore it. You can get back to it later. How can it be non-important if it's urgent? You need to pay your phone bill. Why are you sending me a text message? I know it's automatic, why is this a fucking notification? Hey, I wanna let you know that I will be there next week. Okay, thank you. Thumbs up. Yeah, okay, whatever, dude. Like, you don't have to message me that. Most of your emails, are they important or not? At all?
I'll give you an example of this. When you first announced this and I knew I wanted to make sure I was in the room, I was like, the moment he hits send on that post, it's going to sell out. And I got sales calls blocked up this whole day. I might miss it. I might not be able to attend. So I threw up a message like, Jeff, I got sales calls booked all day, but I really don't want to miss this thing. I was like, ugh, I'm worried I'm going to miss it. He's like, well, it's not until next week. I was like, I know it's not until next week, but I don't want to miss it now. Yeah. But it was like your response was just like you just completely took the air out of me. You're like, so it's next week.
Yeah. No biggie, right? But that's kind of like high urgency, low importance. No biggie. Once you start thinking about this, stuff will get categorized correctly, and then you can start thinking about it correctly. Applying
templates.
We'll talk about that in a second, yeah. So in the most extreme, you can eliminate, and you could argue that this should be delegate. Pick your bucket, right? I try to be extreme and just say, I'm just gonna eliminate this, right? No, you cannot message me all day long, right? Or you have to message somebody else. You can have that conversation. You should not completely ignore this because most times if you're getting a lot of urgency and non-importance, something might be like a leaky bucket, right? You could just record a 10-15 minute walkthrough, give it to somebody else, and say, hey, here's how you solve that problem. Forever. That type of thing. You do that enough, you can have a library of SOPs. We can be communicating with your staff. You say, give me a number 1, a number 7, number 12. Cool. What about low important, low urgent? What happens here?
Delete.
You just fucking delete that shit. Right? I don't need this at all. How many people here still get Groupon emails? When's the last time you opened them?
Dude, do they still make money?
I don't know how they're in business anymore, right? Money laundering. Money laundering, right? How many people have an overly aggressive inbox that's filled with shopping emails? Right? Yeah. When you pay your credit card, it automatically sends an email. You're like, I don't need that. Yeah, that's fine. I know I paid, thank you very much, right? I get an email and a text message, thank you, right? Yep. In your business, you will get a bunch of these and a bunch of these. Most 'cause our brains are used to organizing this correctly, but not in the face of Slack, email, and social media notifications. Those are all specifically designed to get a response out of you. Every single one. Do you remember back in the day when, like, at 5 o'clock you clocked out? You're like, it's not my fucking problem anymore. Remember that stereotype? Like, your dad would come home at like 5:30, and he'd say, that's not my fault, I'm off the clock. We used to do that very, very well. How could it be urgent? I will deal with this shit tomorrow. That used to be normal. Now we don't get that luxury, right? What about stuff that's very important and low urgency? What about an example of that?
Building funnels, optimizing ads.
Cool.
Everything for our own business.
Could be. What else? Writing a book. Writing a book. Everybody wants to write a book, always. I'm gonna put that shit here. That's a very good one, writing a book. Who here has wanted to write a book? I'm
in the process.
In the process. What about— Stripe alerts. Stripe alerts, chargebacks, right? Yeah. What about become healthier? Yeah. What about building long-term success? Right? All the important things that actually matter, which bucket do they go into?
I think I'll ignore it.
Very important and not urgent. That type of stuff, like having deep meaningful conversations with your spouse that matter, being present and paying attention to things, going to the zoo with your kids, that shit goes here. But what stuff do we pay attention to? Emails. What the fuck? That's what happens, right? Give me another example of this stuff. Posting content. Posting content, well, documentation. Creating low-ticket offers. Low-ticket offers, yep. Improving your product. Improving your product. We all, shit that we know, everything. Strategizing, right? Stepping away from our business so that we can think about our business. That type of stuff. There are plenty of people that will pay plenty of money Simply to turn these things into these things so we get the same response. So we get the same physical, emotional, and brain response. This is urgent and important. I need to write my book right now. It just seemed that the sound that slap makes is different than everything else. Yeah, PTSD.
Disable that shit. It was, it was, yeah, I was hearing it even when it wasn't happening.
Yeah, it's fucking horrible, right? What happens when you hire an accountability coach? What do they do to this chart?
They make you work on that bucket.
They get rid of this shit so you're not paying attention to it. They get rid of this shit so you're not paying attention to it, and they transition this over here. 'Cause this is what we respond to. What are examples of stuff that is of high importance and high urgency? Sales calls. Sales calls. I like that. What else you got for me? Give me some, like, real-life stuff. What's high importance and high urgency?
Spend time with your family that's older. Getting sick.
Could be. Getting sick, cancer. Keep going. Your health. Health.
I lost my voice 2 times this year.
Losing your voice. What else? High importance, high urgency. This is very important, you need to deal with it right now. Stretching, going to the gym. Injuries are usually high importance and high urgency. Paying taxes. Yeah. Paying taxes. If you don't do that, I don't know what happens, right? What about getting chased by a tiger? That type of shit. That's what our brains are used to. Storms, fires, tigers, this type of shit. This is what our brains are used to. Yeah, we're quicker to run away from something that we're in fear of than something of pleasure. Because it's high importance and high urgency. This is survival right here. The more you can turn your book into tigers and books into whatever the fuck, Slack notifications, the more success you're gonna have. So this is how I think about your question. Where does that shiny object, which is an incorrect term, it's not a real justice language, where would your new business initiative land on this? A new offer? A new offer. Right now it's currently in the book area. It's here, right? Do you have anything else going on? Tons of things.
Tons of things. I think one of the things that I've noticed myself, and I can't speak for other people, but when all of a sudden finances get a little bit tighter and it's like we're able to produce the income that we needed, we're out of whatever little situation.
And you're like, why the fuck can't I do that all the time? What the fuck is that? It's because of this shit. So when you look at the very successful entrepreneurs, they always act like, some conspiracy theorist is gonna burn the world down and they need to act like if we don't save the planet, the world is gonna come to an end. They are in this bucket all the time. It's highly important and highly urgent.
But you're not saying that that's a healthy space to occupy?
I'm saying that it's a very unhealthy space to occupy all the time. Your adrenaline will burn out, your eyes will fade away, and just like, I'm exhausted all the time. So what happens is you can only do that for a little bit. But having a consciousness of where your shiny objects or new business ideas exist will feel great, because you can go, I think this might be down here.
Makes sense. It's like when— I've never been married, but married friends of mine that are trying to get their relationship in check, all of a sudden tiger turns on, and they're now trying to save something. Tiger mode.
And God forbid we do that shit before it becomes a problem, right? Yeah, but that's just how our brains work, because we're not supposed to exist in a digital world at all. The thing that is most present and most problem is the thing that's in front of your eyes right now, not, right? And not the whole series of notifications and alarms that are going off 24/7.
We're running from or towards Towards shit that ain't even close to us.
It doesn't even exist at all, right? Like, the amount of problems my brain gives me when somebody talks shit on one of my threads is insane. Like, insane. I love your responses. Yeah, right? They're very personal. Like, I hate you and your family. Like, that type of stuff. Like, like, I just say that. Like, yeah, like, this is fantastic. Keep going, please. Like, you should do better than your horrible career. But the response of some idiot halfway around the world about me is directly in front of me, so what does my brain do?
Treats it like a fucking
tiger.
Like it's a fucking tiger. 20 years ago, he could be talking shit and I don't even know, right? Or I could just exit the room and everything is fine. So that's the problem. We're always exposed to everything and our brain doesn't know how to categorize correctly. It's a very difficult skill set.
We call it in our house Fred, and he's a big purple monkey.
Oh, I like that. I've
got kids, like one's autistic and ADHD, and he freaks out when he smells things. And it's like, tell Fred, like, you're good. Yeah, he doesn't need to protect you right now. Like, when you're in the car and like there's traffic and you
