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Between nonstop email chains and back-to-back meetings, it’s easy for professionals to be busy for days without making real progress. Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary says the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs once gave him a simple productivity lesson: Tune out the distractions, and zero in on the work that truly matters. Everything else can wait. 

“During the day, you only need to get three things done,” O’Leary said on the podcast with Kind Snacks founder Daniel Lubetzky. “They’re important each day — not the big vision. Just three things done. You have to do those first.”

According to O’Leary, elite business leaders tend to share a sharp ability to separate what matters from what does not. He says that the people who consistently achieve results do not allow everyday interruptions, from workplace chatter to family phone calls, to dictate their schedules. Instead, they tune out the “noise” of their personal lives and focus on the “signal” of what they need to do immediately at work.

“Anything that stops you from getting the three things done is noise,” O’Leary said. 

Jobs spent 80% of his time on “signal”

O’Leary said that Jobs embodied that philosophy. From his perspective, Jobs believed that a productive person spends 80% of their time focused on the signal and just 20% dealing with distractions. “Because he was 80%, he was extremely difficult to work with,” O’Leary said. “He was tough, and he was brutal, and he was not a nice guy.”

Still, O’Leary pointed to Apple’s success as evidence of how powerful Jobs’ strategy could be. The tactic requires entrepreneurs to decide which conversations and meetings deserve attention and which can wait. 

O’Leary said he has observed an even more intense version of that approach in Elon Musk. O’Leary recalled Shark Tank holiday gatherings hosted by producer Mark Burnett that Musk attended.

“The minute he thinks he’s in a conversation with three people, four people, that he’s getting no value out of it, he just walks away,” O’Leary said. “He just doesn’t want to waste his time, and look at what he’s achieved.”

The strategy’s effects

O’Leary’s ability to block out distractions may have helped fuel a career spanning more than four decades. He launched SoftKey Software Products from his Toronto basement in 1983 and sold the company to Mattel for $3.7 billion in 1999. Since then, he has invested in dozens of companies, including Groovebook, Blueland and Basepaws, while becoming widely known as Shark Tank’s blunt “Mr. Wonderful” over 17 seasons.

O’Leary said that the idea of signal-to-noise “is going to make you a difficult person” and acknowledged that it has contributed to his reputation as someone hard to work with. “That’s why I have so many critics,” O’Leary said. “I don’t care, because it’s noise. It just doesn’t matter to me. And so if it doesn’t matter to me, why should I put any energy into it at all?”