Entrepreneurs often have enough new ideas to kill their focus. A tactical solution is maintaining a dedicated document to fully flesh out every new idea as it arises. This process satisfies the creative urge and provides emotional distance, allowing for more objective evaluation later without disrupting current priorities.

While we easily see open "green doors" and closed "red doors," flourishing people notice "yellow doors"—small signals of curiosity or a half-formed idea that invite exploration. Unlike efficient systems that ignore these diversions, successful groups pause when a team member mentions an aside, ask them to "say more," and discover possibilities together.

Treat strategic thinking as a formal, scheduled activity, not a passive one. By blocking time on your calendar for specific thinking formats—like a walking meeting with yourself or a dedicated commute session—you create the space for your subconscious to solve problems and generate novel insights.

A counterintuitive productivity hack for leaders is to consciously allow minor problems to go unsolved. Constantly trying to extinguish every "fire" leads to burnout and context switching. Explicitly giving a team permission to ignore certain issues reduces anxiety and improves focus on what is truly critical.

To manage a CEO who generates a constant stream of ideas, a senior leader must act as a filter. Decide which ideas serve the company's growth and ignore those that are distractions, even telling the CEO you do so. This builds a relationship based on strategic alignment, not just pleasing the boss.

At scale, the biggest threat isn't a lack of opportunity but mental overload. The key is to treat your focus as a finite resource and actively protect it. This means becoming comfortable saying "I'm done for today" and disappointing people, realizing that protecting your mind is more strategic than satisfying every request.

Not all good ideas can be implemented immediately. An 'idea parking lot' (like a shared doc) serves as a repository. This makes people feel their contributions are valued, even if deferred, and creates a bank of ideas for later.

CEOs can maintain focus by co-creating a simple one-page strategy with their board. When board members later propose off-strategy ideas, this document becomes a powerful tool to re-center the conversation and ask whether the new idea is important enough to displace an agreed-upon priority.

Leaders returning from conferences with many new ideas often overwhelm their teams by trying to implement everything at once. A better approach is to prioritize the single most impactful initiative, plan it meticulously, and launch it successfully before moving to the next one.