I want to begin with a distinction.
Jordan Peterson says somewhere (and I paraphrase freely) that consciousness is something like a scanner: it goes maximally wide, then maximally pinpointed, and back again. It doesn’t really alternate, since we are doing both simultaneously. But our focus pulsates along these two poles, more one way, less the other.
You look for the general and somehow also for the specific.
For example, with sight, you have a wide focus — your field of vision — then a narrow focus: the stop sign when driving.
Your wide focus or soft focus is calibrated to the activity; scanning the horizon while walking, and then focusing on the dog jogging past you to see if he is friendly or fierce.
If you’re having lunch with a friend, you’re pretty narrowly focused (pinpointed) on the friend’s face while conversing, or the menu when ordering. You may not break focus to see cars passing by the cafe unless there is a loud honk or a screeching tire.
(Amazing we can do both of these at once. The modes are contrary!)
But I’m not discussing a fact about attention. I want to springboard to a fact about how work gets done.
Roughly, there are three modes worth naming early:
- Soft/Wide focus — the whole field. What am I responsible for? What season am I in? This can be your project / or list of goals. A dream board. An outcome map. Where is this going, even if not today?
- Hard/Narrow focus — the next concrete action. This email. This paragraph. This call. This task. This meeting.
Hard focus is the half that comes naturally
Most competent people — especially checklist people — are good at hard focus. Soft focus and wide focus are the underused halves.
I polled my honors college students and 95% kept lists. A list is exceptionally good at keeping hard focus, well, focused.
A smaller set still (about two or three out of my thirty) are mental checklist people. They rehearse the day. They visualize, piece by piece, their day and their week so nothing falls through the cracks. These are the mind palace people. Rehearsal can produce high quality productivity. It is not great at producing high quantity. If you have a lot going on, a lot of gear shifting, and try to keep seven to twelve tasks in working memory and you will drop half of them, or you will degrade the ones you keep.
Written checklists beat mental rehearsal for the same reason a shopping list beats “I’ll remember.” The paper (or the app) is an external hard focus. It frees the mind to return to the field.
Yes, you might say, but lists feel cold. Nevertheless: cold lists are how warm intentions survive a busy day.
Base case — a busy student or young professional
If you have 4-5 classes and no side job, your college priorities are clear.
If you are a young professional with 1-2 projects that take up your 8 hours, your mental checklist is sufficient. A written checklist may help for personal projects, side quests at work, shopping lists, and so on.
The benefit of this stage of life is that soft focus is delegated to your boss or provost.
Soft focus is the project map / outcome map: big-picture goals listed separately, or tied to daily tasks without pretending every destination fits inside 9:15–9:45. Big goals must show up on the calendar. If the calendar is only what you remember today, you drift.
But for a young professional or college student, your project map is clear: finish these 5 classes; finish this project. That will move the needle.
The middle case — solopreneur
The next level up is the mid-level professional or the entry level entrepreneur — the solopreneur. You still own the outcomes. You need your lists — and your AI apps. Lists are only half. They are the hard focus.
Soft focus comes squarely into your lap at this stage.
Why these projects? Why these outcomes? Where am I headed? You can’t just “do the next right thing” because you may be taking baby steps in the wrong direction. Or wasting valuable time on low value tangents.
Here, a useful division of labor is simple: let the app hold the hard focus (the next actions, the reminders, the draft replies you will approve), while you keep soft focus on the project map and wide focus on the life those projects serve.
The tool does not replace the scanner. It parks the pinpoint so you can open the field again without losing the next step.
Scale: lists and people
At higher productivity plus high responsibility — clergy, CEOs, politicians — mental checklisting alone collapses. You need lists and people. Dan Sullivan’s Who Not How is the gold standard here: past a certain load you cannot do it all, but you can enlist Whos who figure out How.
At the highest levels of responsibility, you don’t keep the map yourself; you lend the map to your trusted delegates and they report to you their progress. They own that outcome and you are making progress while they work.
You still need to keep your own outcome map to hold helpers accountable, give them direction, help them get unstuck, and replace those who move on in life. But when things are working “people” replaces “list.”
Soft focus is the missing map
So for busy solopreneurs, who don’t have a staff yet, the skill worth practicing is not “be more focused.” It is toggling — wide ↔ soft ↔ hard — faster, with less guilt when you zoom out, and less fog when you zoom in. With practice you handle vast projects because the scanner can open and close on purpose.
Operating numbers (mine)
For what it is worth, my ordinary week looks something like this:
- High value / high leverage deep work
- 3–6 are high-value deep work daily moving 3-5 active, high value projects forward (~50 hours a week)
- PLUS about 30 total tasks per day, moving roughly 20 lighter projects forward (another ~10 hours a week between them).
- It seems like a lot to manage! But the many projects require that much hard focus — a bit of context switching, and some undistracted time (coffee, proper music, proper environment helps).
Soft focus, fine time-slicing, and energy tracking let me hit high-value easy work in the afternoon after morning deep work is done. The point isn’t to post fancy numbers (you can always multiply checkboxes by dividing tasks into more and more parts). Rather, the point is that the scanner opening and closing with intention can accomplish all the high value projects and some medium value or “fun” (but low value) projects along the way, with only a marginal investment.
Punchline
Taking control of your wide focus / narrow focus pulses, and attention: that is maximum productivity — with a staff, or without one. Lists for now, people for later.
Practice the toggle. Write the list. Keep the map. Then do the next small thing as if it were the only thing in the field — because, for that moment, it is.