He cut Apple's products from about 350 to 10. He limited his team to three priorities. Here is how his day might look on a simple three-task planner — built from real stories in his biography.
Steve Jobs
Apple co-founder · Deep Work Duck · focus means saying no
Today's Focus 3/3
🐸 Cut 7 of our 10 product ideas — keep 3
The hardest task of the day: deciding what to stop.
Practice the first five minutes of the keynote
Keynote · repeat until it sounds simple
Walking meeting with the design lead
The studio · no slides, no meeting room
🧠 Brain Dump 4
Find five simpler words for the music player ad
The remote has 41 buttons. It needs 3.
Call the glass supplier about the store staircase
Why does the box need an instruction manual at all?
Pomodoro
🐸 Cut 7 of our 10 product ideas
25:00
Projects 3 active
Next productfrog lives here
Keynote
The studio
💡 Ideas Wall
What would a phone with no keyboard feel like?
What you can learn from Steve Jobs
Start by cutting, not adding.
When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he cut about 350 products down to 10 — and it saved the company. Your hardest task is often deciding what to STOP doing. Make that decision your first task of the day.
Three priorities, not thirty.
Every year he asked his top team to list 10 priorities. Then he crossed out 7 and said: we can only do 3. This is exactly why DuckDoro allows only 3 tasks a day — a short list is a real plan; a long list is a wish.
Walk your important meetings.
Jobs held his serious one-on-one talks while walking. No slides, no meeting room — just clear thinking. Try turning one meeting a day into a walk.
Save ideas for later. Protect today.
He was full of ideas — a simpler remote, a better box. But ideas went into notes, not into today's plan. In DuckDoro, drop them in the Brain Dump and stay on your main task.
Sources: Walter Isaacson's biography Steve Jobs (2011) — the 1997 product cuts and the “top 10 → top 3” yearly meeting — and the 2005 Stanford speech. Details are simplified for illustration.
An imagined workspace. This page is an editorial illustration of
Steve Jobs's well-documented habits, shown inside DuckDoro. It is not affiliated with, or
endorsed by, Steve Jobs, his estate, or any related company — and the only face on this
page belongs to a duck.