Make Time - Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky | Summarized Books

Make Time - How To Focus On What Matters Every Day

Calendars are packed with tasks and everyone is always busy these days

Do you know how people communicate these days? Busy busy busy is the word on everyone’s lips. Our smartphones never stop beeping, and our calendars are always overflowing with tasks and meetings. We are doing so much yet we keep wondering why we aren’t accomplishing much as time flies past. Some activities and projects are now stuck on the someday list.

This book is all about getting off the crazy treadmill and finding more time to do things that matter, whether that is taking your child to school, taking a dance class, spending more time with your family, or mastering Korean. It is possible to be less distracted, less busy and more at the moment.

But why is our life so busy and full of distractions these days?

It's because of two powerful forces that eat up our time. The first force is known as the Busy Bandwagon, which is our culture of endless busyness i.e. endless to-do lists, full calendars, and overflowing inboxes. The mindset of this force is that you need to fill your time with productivity if you want to meet the needs of the modern workplace. The second force is known as the Infinity Pools, which are the apps and other sources of endless content e.g. emails. These forces have turned into our default settings that are present everywhere in our culture, workplace, and devices. The Infinity pools default us to endless and addictive distraction from our TVs, phones, and laptops.

When you are stuck in the middle of the Busy Bandwagon and Infinity Pools, willpower or productivity won’t get you out. Make Time is the way out — you get to decide what to focus on, how to get the energy to do it, and how to be more intentional about your life. The more you try, the more you will learn about yourself and the more the system will improve.

Make Time works in 4 steps which you should repeat every day

While Jake Knapp was working at Google, he started a “design sprint” — a redesigned workweek when the team focuses on solving only one problem by following a specific checklist of activities. The discovery that Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky made during those sprints became the foundation for the four daily steps of Make Time.

The first step involves selecting one daily highlight to focus on — deciding what you want to make time for. The highlight of the day may be taking a class, closing a deal, playing with your kids or walking your dog. Your highlight might contain various steps to enable you to complete the task. You don’t have to do a single thing in a day, your highlight will just be a top priority. This will allow your frame of mind to be proactive and positive.

The second step is to get into laser mode to beat distractions and make time for your highlight. Distractions are literally everywhere around and won’t be leaving any time soon. You also can’t throw away your gadgets and avoid technology completely. The best option is to end the reaction cycle by redesigning your way of using technology.

The third step involves charging your brain with sleep, food, exercise, and face-to-face time. In the twenty-first century, our default lifestyle has discarded our evolutionary history and damaged our energy. The good news is that this can be fixed by implementing simple shifts to get immediate energy that you need.

The fourth step involves taking notes before you go to bed. This is to enable you to refine or drop your current tactics of making time. Reflect on your energy level, the progress of your highlight and the enjoyable things that you did that day. Eventually, you will develop a customized daily system that is best for your unique routines, habits, brain, body, priorities, and goals.

There are dozens of tactics for putting Make Time into practice, it is up to you to choose suitable tactics for highlight, avoiding distraction, and building energy. Pick, test and repeat until you get your own version of Make Time system.

Focus on a daily highlight to slow down, stop the blur and savor the amazing moments in life

Choosing a highlight daily is the only way to end your struggles between distractions in the Infinity pools and demands of the Busy Bandwagon.

Let’s look at the case of the author, John Zeratsky. In early 2008, he suddenly woke up and realized that he couldn’t remember what happened in the last two months. Things were perfect in his life and he wanted to remember that time. He began experimenting and got obsessed over making every hour count. This didn’t work and the blur got worse. He also tried setting long-term goals, which didn’t work either. He eventually managed to slow the time blur by planning simple but satisfying activities — all he had to do was to make sure that each day had a highlight.

“Believe in your highlight: It is worth prioritizing over random disruption.”

Though it is not always easy to choose one highlight for the day, here are the three criteria to help you to decide.

The first strategy is urgency. If you have a task that needs to be completed today, make it your highlight. You can easily find medium-size, important, and time-sensitive tasks on your calendar, to-do lists, or email. The second strategy is about satisfaction. Think about things that you want to do and the sense of accomplishment locked in the potential highlight. Exclude urgent activities, look for projects that are vulnerable to procrastination and not time-sensitive. The third strategy is about doing things that you love i.e. joyful highlights. You don’t need to orchestrate or optimize every single hour of your life. You need to be more joyful and less reactive. Your joyful highlights might seem like a joke to other people but no time is actually wasted when you are being intentional about how you spend it.

It is recommended that you stick with a highlight that takes 60 to 90 minutes. This is because you might not enter the zone in less than 60 minutes and most people need a break spending 90 minutes to focus on a task. You can choose your highlight any time of the day, so if the selected isn’t working out, discard it and choose another that is aligned with your current condition.

There are a lot of fun, challenging, and helpful tactics for choosing a daily highlight, you need to choose one tactic and focus on it

Start by pinpointing the work, projects, and people that mean the most to you. Here are some of the tactics to select a daily highlight:
Write it down. If you want to make time for your highlights, you need to start by writing them down — this will make them likely to happen. Make it a daily ritual to write your highlights before you go to bed or early in the morning. You can jot it down in a notebook or set it as an all-day event on your calendar.

Groundhog it. You don’t need to create new highlights every day. If you didn’t complete the one for yesterday, today is another day to continue it. You can also choose to repeat it to build a habit.

Batch the little stuff. It’s hard to concentrate on your highlight if non-highlight tasks keep piling up. The solution is for you to bundle those small tasks into 1 highlight session and use batch processing to complete them. Catching up at once on things like your emails will keep your inbox empty and makes you feel accomplished.

The might-do list. This helps to avoid the treadmill of to-do lists. Simply add the things that you will like to do on the might-do list. When you want to do them, simply move them one at a time to Highlight and schedule on a calendar.

Run a personal sprint. The brain is like a computer when you are starting a new project — it boots, load necessary info, processes, and rules into your working memory — this process takes time and you have to repeat this process every time you start the project. To work better and faster, you can schedule the same highlight for several days in a row to keep your mental computer in boot mode.

Once you allocate an ideal time to your highlight, don’t schedule any task or meeting at that time. Keep any new tasks in your spare time or on a waiting list.

The hard part is focusing your attention on the present like a laser beam focusing on a target

Laser mode simply appears when you have the energy to focus and you are doing what is close to your heart. This is when you are in the flow and you feel completely immersed and engaged at the moment. It feels good to be laser-focused on your highlight because you are proactively selecting the most important thing to you. Once you are in this mode, your only enemy is distractions from Infinity pools ⁠— a disco ball to your laser beam that scatters the laser light everywhere apart from your focus.

But what causes the irresistible allure of Infinity pools?

The first reason is that tech workers love their job and put love into what they make. They are regularly releasing more sophisticated, faster technologies and gadgets. The second reason is that improvements are continuously made to the products to keep the customers happy. The third reason is that new improvement or feature pushes competitors to up their game. The fourth reason is that technologies take advantage of our caveman’s brains — we evolved to be distractible to stay safe. We also love the mysteries, stories and unpredictable rewards that we get from smartphone notifications. Tech companies make millions when you use their products so you bet that they will keep offering you fire hose to keep you hooked — they will get harder to resist tomorrow.

We get addictive distraction and futuristic superpowers on all screens. As technology improves, our superpowers will become cooler and the machines will keep stealing our attention and time.

Since product designers have spent decades to make products easier for us to access. You need to use some tactics to bring those barriers back and defeat distraction.

You can implement some tricks and tactics to get into laser mode and last longer there to enjoy your highlight

One of the most powerful and simplest ways to reclaim your attention and time is to remove email and other infinity pool apps from your phones. Both Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky have been using distraction-free phones since 2012. This has enabled them to thrive and become effective.

Without the Infinity Pool, a smartphone is still super useful. You can listen to music, use maps, take pictures with the camera and so on without whirling your time away. Become the boss of your phone by deleting social apps, infinity pools, email apps, and web browsers. If you can’t delete them, then clear your home screen, switch off all the notifications, block your distraction Kryptonite, and log out of social media apps.

Have you noticed that your brain feels so rested and refreshed after a good night’s sleep? Don’t reach for the news, email or Facebook right away. If you manage to postpone that check-in time, you will be able to preserve that feeling of a rested mind for longer to enter the laser mode.

For years, experts like David Allen marked an empty email inbox as a symbol of high productivity. The logic is good since out of inbox equal out of mind but this will only work if you only get a few emails per day. To get into the laser mode, you need to slow down your Inbox and check it less often. You can decide to check it at the end of the day or add email time to your calendar. It also helps to empty your calendar by the end of the week.

It is important to seek your passionate moments if you want to enter the laser mode and make time.

It is good to focus fully, reset your device, adjust time, and avoid distractions but you also have to boost your energy level daily

Energy is the key thing that provides you with time to spend your highlights, which might have been lost due to physical and mental fatigue. Picture your body having a battery like that of a laptop that can charge 100% or drain to 0%. When you are feeling exhausted and depressed because of low battery, you are prone to be distracted by infinity pools. The reverse is the case when your battery is full.

Taking good care of your body is the sure way of getting the required energy to maintain a focused and high-performing brain. Prehistoric humans ate different kinds of food and they were constantly on the move but they still had time for family and fun. They communicated face-to-face with people in their tight-knit communities. We originated from them and our lifestyle is still wired like theirs. However, the modern world with the aid of the agricultural revolution has changed our lifestyle into a sedentary one.

If we want our bodies and brains to have the required energy to do modern work, we need to return to the basics and act like a caveman.

Charging your battery will boost your energy level and enable you to think better, feel better, and rest better

There are several effective and practical caveman’s ways to charge your battery.

Movement is one of the best ways to recharge your battery. No fancy workout routine needed, just do a 20-minute workout daily. This will boost your mood, reduce stress, and make you sleep better — the key ingredients for higher energy level for the next day.

You don’t have to change your diet completely. Avoid fake food and try to eat real food like meat, nuts, fruits, and vegetables. If you dislike eating vegetables, put it in the center of your plate and add other foods around it.

It is easy to become addicted to having a cup of coffee during your breaks. Coffee doesn’t actually boost your energy level, the caffeine in it just prevent energy dip caused by sleepiness induced by adenosine molecules. Caffeine is so powerful and you need to be more intentional about drinking it. A coffee expert, Ryan Brown recommends that one should drink the first cup between 9.30-10.30 a.m. and the last cup between 1.30-2.30 p.m. You still have to experiment to find the best time for you to drink coffee.

You can try meditating to relieve stress and increase your focus and happiness. The only problem is that it is hard to stay motivated to meditate because the effect is not externally visible, like that of exercise. It also takes a while to get used to it. Start with three-minute sessions and try using a guided meditation app.

Humans evolved to thrive in tight-knit communities and they crave human connection, even introverts. In this twenty-first century of digital communication, you need to spend time having real conversations with your tribe to energize your body.

Your bedtime should mark the end of your day. Quit sabotaging your bedtime by fiddling with your smartphone before bed. Instead of unwinding, you will end of pumping up your brain. Remove gadgets from your bedroom to keep it as a sanctuary for sleep.

Reflection is all about using science can help to tailor the make time system to your preferences, habits, lifestyle, and body

Reflection is a scientific method that is pretty simple and it consists of four steps: observe what is going on, predict/guess it is happening that way, prove your hypothesis right or wrong, and track the results.

Make Time put those steps into practice. The authors observed the modern world and make guesses on why our attention and time is a wreck. There are over eighty-seven experiments to test hypotheses for highlight, laser and energize in this book. You need to test some tactics and measure the data because only your results matter to you. Collecting data in a book or on your notepad is an easy way to measure the results of your personal experiments. You will be able to reflect on the time you made for highlight and your level of focus on it. You should also note your energy level. It is hard to change your default, so it is beneficial to look back on your day through a grateful lens.

Your life has no big reset button. It is not possible to suddenly make all the tasks on your calendar vanish overnight. You just need to make small shifts to gain more control over your life.

Conclusion

Once you are confident about the tactics and tools of Make Time, you will see that you are ready to change your frame of mind. You just need to start by lessening your distractions and boost your physical and mental energy. By concentrating on one bright spot in your life, you can easily turn a boring day into a great day. Your calendar doesn’t have to be empty so you can gain free 60 to 90 minutes to do what you like. Your goal is to make time for important things, find balance and enjoy your life more.

Try this:
Write a list of the most important things in your life, choose one highlight and focus on it per day. Improve your chances of getting into laser mode by deleting unnecessary and addictive apps on your smartphone. Put your phone on silent mode before sleeping so you can have a good night rest