'Make Time' by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky

In their book, ' Make Time ', Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky share 87 tips for redesigning your time to make more time for the things that really matter.

Do you ever look back and wonder “What did I really do today?” Do you ever daydream about projects and activities you’ll get to someday—but “someday” never comes?

The book is structured around four simple steps: Highlight, Laser, Energise, and Reflect. Each section includes lots of tips, but they suggest trying one tactic at a time from each section and reflecting to see which work best for you. Some tips counteract each other because they have found that what works for one person may not work for another.

We want to help you set your own defaults. With new habits and new mindsets, you can stop reacting to the modern world and start actively making time for the people and activities that matter to you. This isn’t about saving time. It’s about making time for what matters.

You can find lots more information about the book, and recommended resources, on the website: https://maketime.blog/.

Highlight

The first step is to start each day by choosing one task to prioritise. This could be an urgent task, or the one that will bring you the most satisfaction or joy. To decide on a highlight for the day, you could ask yourself:

• What's the most pressing thing I need to do today?
• At the end of the day, what would give me the most satisfaction?
• When I reflect on my day, what experience would give me the most joy?

Setting a priority helps us to step off what they describe as the Busy Bandwagon - that badge of honour that we seem to assign to being busy all the time.

Asking yourself “What’s going to be the highlight of my day?” ensures that you spend time on the things that matter to you and don’t lose the entire day reacting to other people’s priorities. When you choose a Highlight, you put yourself in a positive, proactive frame of mind.

Laser

The book includes lots of tips for beating distraction to make more time. The authors advise removing or adjusting phone apps and reducing the distractions of email and social media to avoid getting sucked into Infinity Pools of endlessly replenishing content. But both wholeheartedly believe in the benefit of technology at the right time - Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky are both product designers who met working at Google and have spent years in the tech industry building services such as Gmail, YouTube, and Google Hangouts.

If you create barriers around the Busy Bandwagon and the Infinity Pools, we predict you’ll focus your attention like a laser beam.

Energise

The next section of tips are about making small changes to the default 21st century lifestyle to create and maintain energy throughout the day. This includes ideas about how to move more, eat better, optimise caffeine, relax, socialise and sleep better.

Many of the tips suggest living more like a caveman ancestor, who they have named Urk. They make reference to another book that I really enjoyed recently, Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, which surveys the history of humankind from the Stone Age to the 21st century and reflects on how our lifestyles have changed.

If you adopt a few small Urk-like activities, you can get the best of the twenty-first century and the best from your old-fashioned Homo sapiens self.

Reflect

Finally, the book gives a template for a short daily reflection about which tactics worked and didn't work.

The authors suggest using a scientific method to:

1. OBSERVE what's going on.
2. GUESS why things are happening the way they are.
3. EXPERIMENT to test your hypothesis.
4. MEASURE the results and decide whether you were right.

Quick start

For a quick way to start, they suggest trying out these tactics first:

• Highlight: Schedule your highlight (#8)
• Laser: Block distraction kryptonite (#24)
• Energise: Pound the pavement (#62)
• Reflect every evening for 3 days

Summary

This is a nice visual video summary of the book, by Nathan Lozeron :

Hear the authors talk about their book

You can see Jake Knapp talk about his book in this video:

You can hear John Zeratsky talk about his book on this podcast:

Download

To download a free larger copy of the images for printing or sharing, and a PDF version of the summaries, visit?https://melanieknight42.gumroad.com/l/vftxie.

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