Welcome to the fourth Non-Fiction feature of the year! I first came across Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day when I was looking for work-life balance books. It was only a few weeks later when I found myself wanting to enforce some structure to my work day, to not have to hop between tasks as per other people’s demands, that this book popped up in recommendations. I really enjoyed this book as an audiobook- with two authors and narrators, it was like listening to a conversation which had a lot to offer to me. I was pleasantly surprised and very happy that Make Time had strategies that could be applied outside work, hence solidifying its position as a work-life balance book. The tactics in this book relate to life as a whole and you bet I have tried a bunch.
Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day
By Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky | Goodreads
From the New York Times bestselling authors of Sprint, a simple 4-step system for improving focus, finding greater joy in your work, and getting more out of every day
Nobody ever looked at an empty calendar and said, “The best way to spend this time is by cramming it full of meetings!” or got to work in the morning and thought, Today I’ll spend hours on Facebook! Yet that’s exactly what we do. Why?
In a world where information refreshes endlessly and the workday feels like a race to react to other people’s priorities faster, frazzled and distracted has become our default position. But what if the exhaustion of constant busyness wasn’t mandatory? What if you could step off the hamster wheel and start taking control of your time and attention? That’s what this book is about.
As creators of Google Ventures’ renowned “design sprint,” Jake and John have helped hundreds of teams solve important problems by changing how they work. Building on the success of these sprints and their experience designing ubiquitous tech products from Gmail to YouTube, they spent years experimenting with their own habits and routines, looking for ways to help people optimize their energy, focus, and time. Now they’ve packaged the most effective tactics into a four-step daily framework that anyone can use to systematically design their days. Make Time is not a one-size-fits-all formula. Instead, it offers a customizable menu of bite-size tips and strategies that can be tailored to individual habits and lifestyles.
Make Time isn’t about productivity, or checking off more to-dos. Nor does it propose unrealistic solutions like throwing out your smartphone or swearing off social media. Making time isn’t about radically overhauling your lifestyle; it’s about making small shifts in your environment to liberate yourself from constant busyness and distraction.
A must-read for anyone who has ever thought, If only there were more hours in the day…, Make Time will help you stop passively reacting to the demands of the modern world and start intentionally making time for the things that matter.
Takeaway from Make Time
Education is a very organized challenge that we take on earlier in life. It has its short term as well as long term milestones, already set up for us. As we get older though and there is no curriculum to follow, we are faced with the task of managing our own time, setting our own goals based on what we want to do and finding ways to be happy and satisfied. It’s not surprising that we fall back on others to make these goals and tasks for us.
In today’s fast-paced world where information is available at our fingertips and instant messages and alerts are endless, one might feel the need to get more done and become stuck in a busy cycle. Jake and JZ call this the BusyBandwagon: “our culture of constant busyness – the overflowing inboxes, stuffed calendars, and endless to-do lists. According to the Busy Bandwagon mindset, if you want to meet the demands of the modern workplace and function in modern society, you must fill every minute with productivity. After all, everyone else is busy. If you slow down, you’ll fall behind and never catch up.” This is a sentiment that is shared by many books, including The Mindful Day by Laurie J. Cameron. To get everything done, and yet never be able to catch up because there will be more. Work aside, holiday season bring their own must-dos: whether it is baking or putting together a potluck.
If we want to stop the days blurring into each other, we have to learn to experience the moment. Add meaning to each day by doing meaningful things. Things that matter to us. Jake and JZ said that adding meaning leads to satisfaction. I tried it and indeed it does! They talked about the challenge of working towards personal long term goals – it can be hard to enjoy the time spent working on them when the timeline is set by us and has to adapt to what else is going on in our lives.
What was the bright spot of your day yesterday?
To be able to answer a question like this is to have done something meaningful and memorable in the day past. Jake and JZ provide a brilliant framework to make time for the things that matter (and sometimes they would be work things) and be fulfilled in life. They are digital designers who worked at Google – they know all about the intent of the technologies we use, have been sucked into the bottomless pit of endless scrolling and searches, and with their experimental mindset, they have been able to dig their way out and take control of their lives.
The concept of defaults
On top of the Busy Bandwagon, there are Infinity Pools that are vying for our attention. Pinterest, instagram, the web browser that lets us search up anything we want… we can and do get lost in these apps and content.
This was a new way of looking at technology and life for me: the Busy Bandwagon and Infinity Pools have become our default. It is ok to be busy and have lots left to do and it is normal to get sucked into websites and lose track of time. With humor, Jake and JZ identify and challenge the defaults we have fallen into, whether it is the unproductive work meetings that go nowhere, the rework we do on projects, or the alters we get on our phone when a new email or message pops up. Everything has defaults.
We can change them.
In today’s world, willpower is no longer the way out. We are too distracted to make it work. We have to be intentional in how to use our time. We have find ways to limit the distractions where there is that one thing we want to pursue today for sure. This is where the Make Time framework comes in handy. Let me give you an overview of the pieces:
Highlight of the day
Sometimes I don’t know where the day went. I might feel I wasted my time. This strategy of setting a highlight for the day, whether I do that first thing in the morning or as the last thing at the end of the day, is about being intentional about how I spend my time – picking a 60-90 min task that I want to focus on. I was reminded of Jon Acuff’s Soundtracks: to have a goal for the week that I want to make progress towards. In the weeks that I have set highlight of the day, sometimes it’s to work on my goal, other days it’s visiting with someone, taking notes. Jake and JZ share lots of tactics to set the highlight as well as
Do it – Laser in on it
The next part of the framework is Laser: finding a dedicated time to complete the highlights. This is a time of focused attention and everything has to be used with intention in this time period.
This is the part where we change the defaults. I am obsessed with checking my email. Learning about how Jake and JZ manage their emails was amazing! They recommend checking email at the end of the day as it is less tempting then to overcommit. Considering my energy levels after a day of work, I totally vouch for this strategy! Similar to instant messages, the default with emails is to respond quickly. But we don’t have to. Treating them like physical letters, taking the time to craft them, is a great way to break this habit.
There are many ways to laser in: In Make Time, I found tactics to manage my phone, stay out of infinity pools, change my relationship with my email and TV, finding flow and staying in the zone. Simple actions like putting on headphones, closing the door, inventing a deadline to keep us accountable, using a timer to indicate this is focus time were some great ideas that the book recommended and I have tried. I often do my writing with Lofi music in the background or headphones (no music – creating a noise free vacuum is a great way to zone in!). Setting a timer keeps me focused on my task for that time and after that, depending on how I am feeling, I can change what I was doing or keep going.
Jake and JZ emphasize that laser time has to be done wholeheartedly with intention.
Energize
The book also goes into the building blocks of a good lifestyle – the importance of exercising, regulating caffeine intake, building a morning or night routine and much more. These activities give our mind a break from the work and reset. Both Jake and JZ carve out time for their families during the Energize phase. I am learning from another book, Feeling Seen by Jody Carrington, how important one-on-one time is and I love that the energize part of the framework makes sure that we carve out sometime to be with our loved ones, take rest and relax.
Reflect
Do you reflect at the end of the day?
Journaling is such a powerful way of collecting data about ourselves and having a place to go back to which shows our growth. Jake and JZ recommend picking a tactic or two, giving it a try and then reflecting at the end how we felt about it. Did it work for me? To change for the next day or to keep it another day. There is no right or wrong. Jake and JZ are different people and what worked for one did not work for the other. I enjoyed hearing these differences and it gave me confidence to try and find out what works best for me.
Tactics from Make Time
Though I tried many tactics from this book, even without knowing how they supported this framework, here are a few from each part of Make Time that I was able to integrate into my routines:
| Highlight | Laser | Energize |
|---|---|---|
| ⁕ The Might-Do list (create a list of potential highlights, do the one you want) ⁕ Groundhog it (repeat the highlight from yesterday) ⁕ Use the first couple hours after you wake up effectively | ⁕ Nix notifications (limit notifications on the phone to essential apps or people) ⁕ Ignore the news ⁕ Set a visible timer | ⁕ Wake up before you caffeinate ⁕ Spend time with your tribe ⁕ Make your bedroom a bed room |
If you already do at least one of these, congratulations! You are taking steps to make time for the things that matter to you. Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day has a lot to offer. It is a great guide to go back to. I looked through the physical book and it looks like a lot of fun with art.
Check out the Make Time website for an overview of all these ideas and learn more about Jake and JZ.
Thanks for making it to the end of this review! I appreciate you! Writing about books I love to you is a highlight of my day.
What’s a highlight of your day? Tell me in the comments.
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