Signal vs Noise

Alright, I’m not going to lie, this month has been big. A crunch. The kind where you peer outside the window, or more accurately, into the next news tab, thinking this next piece will finally help you make sense of the world’s problems and uncertainties. But here’s the thing, we all intuitively know, it won’t, but it doesn't seem to stop us. Latest reports indicate that we now spend an average of 3.15 hours per day on our phones, picking them up at least 58 times, and these numbers are only rising. The most vulnerable to this digital pull are Gen Z, with three in four admitting they spend more time on their smartphones each day than they’d like.

Somewhere in the middle of the month, my partner and I, she running Cygnet Perfumery, me running PUR Production, sat down and admitted something to each other, that something had to give, not just the busyness of running a business, but the sheer onslaught of everything. The doomscrolling, the headlines, the creeping feeling that if we weren’t paying attention to everything, we were missing something important.

So, we had a magical water-cooler moment, except in our own house. We called it for what it was and decided to detox. Simple, right? Except, when your work involves being online, communicating, it’s not that simple at all. The platforms we need to exist within are the same ones designed to keep us endlessly engaged, nudging us down the rabbit hole to nowhere fast.

Five Strikes Against Mindless Scrolling

We realised that our Achilles’ heel was stress, the kind that makes you check your phone one more time, push a little harder, sprint toward a finish line that keeps moving. It’s a strange paradox: running a business often means widening your attention, but to actually succeed, you need to narrow your focus.

So, we set a rule: 15 minutes of social online interaction per day. Every scroll or interaction outside of work hours or that allotted time? A strike. Five strikes, and you lose, at the mercy of the other for a full day.

The kids want our attention, the business needs our attention, each other needs our attention, and then there’s the phone. The trick, we found, isn’t just limiting screen time but understanding the incentives at play: who benefits from your distraction?

Because at the end of the day, our time, our attention, is the most valuable thing we own.

Stay tuned for how it went.

The Great Industrial Shift

Now, onto what’s really been occupying my mind and a main cause for me picking up my phone randomly throughout the day. It looks like we’re shifting into a new industrial era, one that nobody is truly ready for but is happening in real time. Supply chains are reimagining themselves on the fly. Entire industries are pivoting. Or so it would seem or some would have you believe. 

Just look at the latest episode of The Decoder Podcast, feat Evan Smith CEO of Altana Technologies, who breaks down his and the company's five-year bet theory on how businesses making long-term plays in this shifting landscape will ultimately win out. And this has me thinking: What does this mean for our kids? For the people in our organisations? (shout out Joe Rogers for the poddy recommendation)

It got me thinking, if the world is shifting beneath our feet, how do we prepare them to thrive in uncertainty? To forge their own paths despite the distractions coming from all angles? Evan and his company track the supply chain in real time. We don't have anything to track the real time effect on society at large, the cost of the change and the arbitrage of real concern in the face of uncertainty being captured, fanned. Hello the age of rage. 

Because that’s the thing, distraction is now being hardwired into us from an early age. I recently heard during an ABC conversation hour that young girls are hesitating to smile in photos, not because they don’t want to, but because they’re worried about how their teeth might look online, worried about the digital judgment that might come later.

This is the world they’re growing up in. And it’s happening at a speed that most educational systems, and businesses, haven’t even begun to address.

The Unlock We Already Have

Gen AI is coming. Some argue it’s already here. And the conversation is all about how it will speed up productivity. But what if I told you the real unlock in productivity isn’t AI—it’s detoxing from the platforms designed to hijack our dopamine supply?

I’ve tested it. It works.

This month, stepping away from the attention economy hamster wheel was like nothing I’ve experienced before. The lessons are there, the unlocks are already around us. The world is shifting, and the ones who can distinguish between the noise and the signal will win. The question is how do you teach that skill and upskill your workforce?

So, when it comes to educating our kids, and the people within our organisations, it’s time to look around. See what we’re actually sitting on. And figure out how to work with it, not against it.

Loonshots, Phoenixes, and the New Dawn

To wrap this one up, I just finished reading Loonshots by Safi Bahcall, shout out Simon Goodrich for the recommendation. It's a book that unpacks how the biggest innovations in society often start out as forgotten ideas, only to rise like a phoenix and change everything. It’s a reminder that the real breakthroughs aren’t obvious at first, they emerge from the margins, from people thinking differently, outside the frame of “how things are done.” Picking things up and looking at them from a different perspective than previously done, finding the missing piece or reviewing the data in a new framework to reveal the true gold. Change is slow until it scales.

That’s what we need right now.

Because if you step back and look around, it feels like the 1930s, right on the edge of something massive. A new dawn of enterprise. And the hardest part? Keeping our heads up, managing today’s fires while still creating space to shape the future we actually want.

So the challenge is this: How do we find the resources, the time, the mental bandwidth, not just to survive this shift, but to help lead it in a direction we want to take it?

That’s the question I’m sitting with. If you’re thinking about it too, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Until next time, Patrick