The Story
A startup founder prided herself on being accessible. Open Slack channels. Office hours for anyone. She read every customer support ticket, sat in on sales calls, and reviewed every PR before it went out.
She called it “staying close to the business.” Her board called it “not scaling.”
The breaking point came during a product launch. In the final week, she was simultaneously debugging customer complaints from six months ago, wordsmithing a blog post, responding to a vendor dispute, and trying to review the launch strategy. She had eleven browser tabs open, four Slack threads demanding attention, and a growing sense that everything was urgent.
The launch went out with a critical bug. Not because no one saw it—because the person who saw it couldn’t get the founder’s attention through the noise.
The Lesson
Input Triage asks: What actually deserves my attention right now?
The founder’s failure wasn’t lack of effort—it was treating every input as equally important. Customer complaints from six months ago competed with a launch happening in six days. Blog post wording competed with product bugs. Everything demanded attention, which meant nothing got enough.
Most information is noise. It feels urgent. It presents itself as important. But acting on it doesn’t move you toward your goal—it just keeps you busy while the real priorities drift.
Input Triage is the skill of ruthless filtering:
- What’s actually time-sensitive? Not “someone wants an answer” but “waiting will cause real damage.”
- What only I can do? If someone else can handle it, it shouldn’t be in your queue.
- What moves the needle? If resolving it doesn’t change your outcomes, it’s not priority work.
Applying It
Before responding to any input, ask:
Is this signal or noise? Does this information change what I should do? If not, it’s noise—acknowledge and move on.
What’s the cost of ignoring this? Not “will someone be annoyed” but “what breaks if I don’t address this?” Most things can wait. Some can’t.
Am I the right person for this? Attention is finite. Spending yours on something someone else could handle is a trade-off, not a virtue.
The founder could have established filters: customer issues go to support, vendor disputes go to ops, her attention goes only to decisions that require her judgment. She could have blocked the launch week entirely—no meetings, no tickets, no blog reviews. Just the launch.
Input Triage isn’t about being unavailable. It’s about protecting your attention for the things that actually require it. Being reachable for everything means being effective at nothing.