Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky

Overview

Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky is a book geared to helping you understand how you can better utilise the time that you have each day with some particularly eye-opening perspectives on managing your day to day life and approach to getting things done.

In this post, I’ll work through the book’s chapters and key points summarising the main takeaways and sharing some insight into how I personally aim to (and have been) applying the ideas to my own life, with my results.

Jake and John share their own thoughts throughout the book, with experience gained from working at Gmail and YouTube, as well as their own personal revelations in a light-hearted way with evidence-backed methods targeted at identifying your goals in life, and how to best achieve your goals by simply finding and allocating the time.


Key Areas

Highlight

The aim of the Highlight method is to start each day with one clear objective, you have to assess the goals that you have on your plate, and stick a fork in the most important one. It’s not the only thing you’ll do today, but it’s the one thing you should definitely do your utmost to do. You can end your day being proud that you ticked off your highlight.

When you look back on your day, what activity or accomplishment or moment do you want to savor? That’s your highlight.

The first step is choosing a single highlight to prioritize in your day. Next, you’ll employ specific tactics to stay laser-focused on that highlight—we’ll offer a menu of tricks to beat distraction in an always-connected world. Throughout the day, you’ll build energy so you can stay in control of your time and attention. Finally, you’ll reflect on the day with a few simple notes.

Steps:

  1. Write down your daily highlight – This is the main goal for your day and your priority action. It doesn’t mean it has to be the first thing you do, but you must give it priority attention at some point today.
  1. Repeat. You don’t need a new highlight each day. If you didn’t complete your previous highlight, that’s okay, some things just aren’t feasible to accomplish in one day. Reassess and you can decide if you should keep it as your highlight for the next day.
  1. Write what’s important in your life, and then rank them – This allows you to build a clearer mental model of your priorities and your goals, once you’ve got them down on paper you’ll find it a lot easier to determine what your highlights should be.
  1. Batching – Batching is an effective way of letting many smaller mundane tasks build up so that you can then plan ahead and tackle them all (or a big chunk of them) in one hit at a scheduled time. This could be your emails, returning phone calls, or even housework. Allowing these tasks to collect in a controlled way removes the spontaneous distractions they create. Rather than putting out fires when they arise, you’ve dedicated some time for these specific activities and controlling the build-up.

The first thing we learned was that something magic happens when you start the day with one high-priority goal.

There’s a tendency for most of us to revert to the path of least resistance in life, and this is amplified when we’re under greater stress. If I ask myself, ‘when do I most often break my productive routines like working out, reading books, generally focussing on things I know I should be doing?’ almost all of the time it’s when in a state of heightened stress.

By setting this daily highlight, one clear goal for the day, it not only feels achievable but the very act of doing it makes you feel good and makes you far more likely to get other things done too.

What I’ve found since I started implementing this tactic of setting a daily highlight is that by doing it first thing in the morning with a coffee and a clear head, I get in ahead of life’s distractions and calibrate my day with a clear roadmap of things I want to achieve.

To-do lists

After defining the one main goal for the day, it’s also useful to have a list of smaller goals – things that would be nice to achieve, but aren’t mission-critical.

Two methods:

  1. Might do list – less pressure, things you might do.
  1. Burner List – Sheet of paper divided into two. Laid out on paper like a typical stove, there’s the front burner and back burner. Give the front the most attention, checking on the back burner less frequently but keeping it ticking over. Lastly, there’s the Sink, these are items that you’re mostly jotting down for awareness but hold a low level of importance.

Method 1 works best for me personally. I tried using the burner list method, categorising my non-highlight tasks into the three tiers of importance, but I found it to be a little tedious and ended up filling in the sections just to have something written.

Using a standard to-do list, secondary to the Highlight, allowed for a clear concise list of things that would be nice to get done as well as including some ‘quick win’ tasks which you can quickly accomplish when feeling in need of a momentum booster.

Emphasis on momentum, try to accumulate a few consecutive days with the highlight being one larger project. Each day making progress to the same big goal. Once you have a streak going the motivation to get more done each day comes far more naturally.

So you’ve decided what your goals are for the day, mainly your Highlight. Now how do you best go about getting it done? Use your calendar. We’ve all got calendar apps on our phones and it’s really quick and easy to ‘design your day’ through them. You can leave most of your day to be as fluid as you like, but try blocking out a period in the day where you’ll focus on just your highlight.

Approaching your highlight with this kind of structure eliminates the “I’ll do it later” thoughts which inevitably arise throughout a less regimented day. You’ll have a distraction-free period where you can get your head down and make good progress. You’ll come to love these periods.

Become a morning person, countless studies have shown that many people are most productive in the morning, and it shouldn’t really come as a shock, our brains are freshly recharged and our minds haven’t yet been polluted by daily stressors. This part can be a bit painful to begin with – set the lights to come on automatically early in the morning (smart bulbs are relatively inexpensive – I use TP-Link as a cheap alternative to Philips Hue), alternatively, set an alarm on your phone and leave your phone out of reach from your bed when you go to sleep forcing you to get up and out of bed to turn it off.

The quiet hours before work are a great opportunity to get stuff done, and by getting stuff done it’ll start your day on a positive note.

Laser focus

To make the best use of our time, it’s critical we protect our focus in the periods when we’re really trying to get things done. Distractions are everywhere with our tech, and they’re all designed to capture our attention.

Be the boss of your phone, delete apps that fall into the category of ‘Infinity Pools’. You know the type – endless scrolling, zombie-like fixation on never-ending garbage.

  • Social media
  • Youtube
  • Email
  • Web Browser

This is different for everyone, if you don’t find these apps absorbing your attention at a rate you think is crossing a line then you don’t have a problem, life’s good, carry on!

Almost every app these days is designed with constant notifications. Teach your phone some manners and don’t let it interrupt you, have your phone speak when spoken to by disabling all non-essential notifications. This approach is a bit less invasive than removing the apps altogether but is still highly effective.

I found a mixture of the two methods the more effective, I deleted all social media apps and disabled notifications for all remaining other than texts and calls. I don’t miss any of it.

Add a layer of friction between your focus and any remaining apps by removing these apps from your home screen. You’ll likely be shocked at how often you then catch yourself reaching for your phone ready to tap on an app that is no longer there. I certainly was.

Email – schedule email time. Check your inbox two to three times per day, if possible towards the end of the day. Disable email notifications. I found this to be the most uncomfortable step to take. Many of us use our emails throughout the day for work and by disabling your email notifications there’s an anxiety that you’ll miss something urgent that needs immediate action. The reality is, this almost never happens and emails can wait until you’re ready to process them.

There shouldn’t be an expectation with emails to be treated like instant messaging apps (Microsoft Teams, Skype, Zoom). If something is really urgent, someone will message/call you. Emails can almost always be left for some time, and then batched into targeted productive bursts without drawing your attention away from whatever it is you’re working on.


Finding Flow

  • Shut the door – put a barrier between you and the outside world. If possible create a safe haven, a distraction-free environment where your soul purpose is to be creative and get your work done.
  • Invent a deadline and organise it into your calendar – Following Parkinson’s Law, work expands to take the length of the time allocated to it. If you set yourself hard deadlines you’ll force yourself into getting the work done with the motivation of a looming end-point.
  • Explode your highlight – break your big highlight task down into several more achievable tasks, each with a clear verb to DO something. Your focus is still the overall highlight, but you now have a clearer path to get there which will feel a lot more achievable.
  • Set a visible timer somewhere within your workspace – pomodoro – Have a visual reminder that the time is ticking, and it’s time you’ve allocated to be working.


Retaining Flow/Laser Mode

  • You’ll often get impulsive thoughts of other things you need to get done while you’re working on your Highlight tasks, don’t let these pull you away totally but it’s also worth noting them down to then get back to them later. By writing them down and filing that thought away somewhere in a To-Do list, on a note, wherever, it tells your brain that you’ve handled that thought and you can get back to what you need to be doing.
  • If you find yourself getting distracted by unrelated thoughts and ‘noise’, take a moment to notice your breath. Bringing focus to the body shuts up the noise in our head.
  • Embrace being bored – that’s when our minds get the most creative.
  • Embrace being struck – if you’re stuck on a problem, embrace it, don’t use it as an excuse to take your focus elsewhere. Get unstuck.
  • Rest – take a day off. Recharge.
  • Energize by working on something you really care about. Sometimes you feel tired but something you do reverses it in an instant. Ever felt too tired to go to the gym but once you’re there you feel great?

Methods to keep energized

  • Move more – 20 mins per day walking/running or any workout
    • 7 Minute workout app
    • Walk wherever you can, don’t choose the closest parking spot, use stairs instead of lifts. Lots of little wins make a huge difference as they compound, try to make those choices your norm. Whatever works for you, integrate some changes into your daily routine. Add inconvinces which get you moving more and you’ll find you instantly feel like you have more time as you fill those walking periods become time to think.
    • Do it every day (if you can). The ‘feel good hormones’ last for a day, if you do it every day consistently you’ll get a consistent free mood booster.
  • Eat less processed foods
    • Eat like a hunter-gatherer, give your engine the natural and expected fuel.
    • Research shows big energy level increases when the body is consuming less processed foods.
    • Learn to be okay with being hungry. It’s become the norm to eat as soon as we feel hunger, but some level of hunger can actually help increase your focus once you get used to it.
    • The tricky thing about caffeine is that if you wait to drink it until you get tired, it’s too late: The adenosine has already hooked up with your brain, and it’s hard to shake the lethargy. We’ll repeat that because it’s a crucial detail: If you wait until you get tired, it’s too late.Optimize your caffeine intake, give yourself boosts at the right times
      • “To the brain, caffeine molecules look a lot like a molecule called adenosine, whose job is to tell the brain to slow down and feel sleepy or groggy. Adenosine is helpful in the evening as you get ready for bed. But when adenosine makes us sleepy in the morning or afternoon, we usually reach for caffeine. When caffeine shows up, the brain says, “Hey good-lookin’!” and the caffeine binds to the receptors where the adenosine is supposed to go. The adenosine is left to just float around, and as a result, the brain doesn’t get the sleepy signal. What’s interesting in this (at least to us) is that caffeine doesn’t technically give you an energy boost; instead, it blocks you from having an energy dip caused by adenosine-induced sleepiness.”
      • his personalized formula, backed by science and proven by experience, was crazy simple: • Wake up without caffeine (in other words, get out of bed, eat breakfast, and start the day without any coffee). • Have the first cup between 9:30 and 10:30 a.m. • Have the last cup between 1:30 and 2:30 p.m.
  • Go off the grid – modern technology is designed to capture your attention and energy. Have periods where you’re away from it all.
    • Meditation, try apps like headspace – if the word ‘meditation’ loses you, then just call it ‘resting’, ‘quiet time’, whatever – it doesn’t really matter, but it’s been proven to increase focus after a session, just 10 minutes can have notable results.
    • Take mini-vacations from your headphones – give your brain a moment of quiet to recharge. Even listening to songs you’ve heard a million times still engages your brain.
    • Take a real break, in the real world. Get away from your screens, put your phone down and gaze out of a window (it’s good for your eyes), or go for a walk, or meet up with a friend for a walk. Taking a break by scrolling instagram or twitter isn’t a break, it’s just an infinity pool grabbing your attention.
    • Make your bedroom a bedroom – sounds obvious, but our bedrooms these days are so swamped with tech it’s hard to escape it.
    • Control your day and night time with night modes on screens, turn all ceiling lights off in the evening and use softer table/floor lamps, or go one step further and set up automatic faked sunrise/sunset lights, it’s really easy. Ref my actual usage over the last few years

Reflect

The science is simple, hypothesize > test > measure.

  • Highlight hypothesis (with one single intention each day you’ll feel more satisfied, joyful and effective).
  • Laser hypothesis (creating barriers around the reactive ‘busy bandwagon’ lifestyle and infinity pools you can focus your attention like a laser beam.