Make Time: How to focus on what matters every day

Product Information

There are people—your family, friends, colleagues, or neighbors— you want to spend more time with, but you feel like “life” just gets in the way. Fortunately, there is a way out: setting your own defaults. Make Time Is Just Four Steps, Repeated Every Day But we only get a certain number of days to live our life—and we don’t know how many until they’re gone! Look for activities that are not urgent. Instead, consider projects you’ve been meaning to get around to but haven’t quite found the time for. Maybe you have a particular skill you want to put to use, or maybe it’s a pet project that you want to develop before sharing it with the world. These projects are super vulnerable to procrastination, because although they’re important, they are not time-sensitive, and that makes them easy to postpone. Use your Highlight to break the “someday” cycle.

The second step is to "Laser," or eliminate distractions and time-wasting activities that take away from your highlighted activities.Make Time has become an essential part of my life, like brushing my teeth. I can’t really imagine living without it. I plan to keep experimenting with the tactics I’ve yet to try, and most of all, using Make Time as a way to slow down and enjoy the work I’m doing more and more.” —Connor in London By focusing on the things that matter most to you, Make Time presents a four-step process for creating more time in your life. The second force is something called the Infinity Pools, i.e., “apps and other sources of endlessly replenishing content,” aka Facebook, YouTube, Google News, Netflix, HBO, Candy Crash, etc.

It’s natural to think we need more discipline, willpower, energy, stamina, focus, or grit to resist these distractions. More something, for sure. Make Time is the product of this line of thinking. It is, in its essence, a collection of 87 tactics framed within four steps which should help you reclaim your time. The third step is to "Energize," or find ways to increase your energy and focus, such as through exercise and breaks. Plenty of self-help gurus have offered suggestions for setting goals, and plenty of productivity experts have created systems for getting things done. But the space between has been neglected. We call the missing piece a Highlight. What Will Be the Highlight of YourDay?

Discover how to better control your time and focus on what matters. Be productive and reach your goals every day!

Write your second most important project at the top of the right-hand column. List the related to-dos Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day 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 Too often,we get bogged down in the demands of each day and struggle to find time for what really matters. In this powerful book, Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky explain how small changes in the design of our days can give us more time for the people and activities that energize and fulfill us. Essential reading for anyone who wants to create a happier, more successful life."

You can design your time by choosing where you direct your attention. And your daily Highlight is the target of that attention. The epigraph to Make Time—a quote by none other than Mahatma Gandhi—reveals a lot about its authors’ objectives: “There is more to life than increasing its speed.” In the dynamic world of the 21 st century, two powerful forces compete for every single minute of your waking life: The Busy Bandwagon and the Infinity Pools.The tactics in the book came from the authors’ research and experiments. However, what worked for them may not work for you. This final step is about refining your strategies/tactics to suit your lifestyle and goals. This will allow you to make time to do what really matters in your life, with small changes in your routine. About the authors Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky The first step is to "Highlight," or identify the most significant activities that you want to focus on. Not every hour has to be optimized and orchestrated for maximum efficiency. One of our goals with Make Time is to steer you away from the impossible vision of perfectly planned days and toward a life that’s more joyful and less reactive. That means doing some things just because you like doing them.

You can have an experience (even if it's temporary) of canceling cable TV, HBO, Netflix... Since there's always something going on in these streaming services, which can lead you to distraction. We disagree. Doing more doesn’t help you create time for what matters; it just makes you feel even more frazzled and busy. And when you’re busy day after day, time slides by in a blur. What I didn't like was the energy section's emphasis on evolutionary psychology and living like a caveman (the caveman was called Urk, which I found irritatingly cutesy). The basic idea is that there's a "huge disconnect between our hunter-gatherer roots and our crazy modern world", and we should try to live more like a caveman because our bodies evolved for that lifestyle. This perspective requires some extreme simplifications that often seemed pretty dubious. Here's one passage:

Select a format:

Our goal is to help you create a healthy, sustainable habit of using the daily Highlight and the rest of the Make Time framework to focus on what matters every day. Can I move at my own pace? Yes! The lessons will be released once a week according to the schedule above. If you fall behind, you can easily catch up. We recommend not working ahead, because the course schedule was carefully designed for maximum learning benefit, but if you ask nicely we can accelerate your lessons 🤓