Make Time: Summary Review
This is a summary review of Make Time containing key details about the book.
What is Make Time About?
Make Time is a book that provides a practical guide for using technology and design to reclaim control of time and attention, and create a more intentional, fulfilling, and productive life.
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.
Summary Points & Takeaways from Make Time
Some key summary points and takeaways from the book include:
* Book "Make Time" focuses on how to prioritize and manage time effectively in today's fast-paced, technology-driven world.
* The authors introduce the "Highlight Method", a simple but powerful approach to focus on what truly matters by using two key elements: "Highlight" and "Energize."
* Highlight refers to identifying and focusing on one's most important tasks, whereas Energize means engaging with activities that give energy and refreshment.
* The book highlights the importance of mindfulness, self-awareness and creating habits to make time work for you.
* It covers topics like digital distractions, time wasters, and the power of rituals, routines, and environment to optimize time.
* The book provides practical tools and techniques to implement the Highlight Method, including time blocking, limiting distractions, and creating boundaries.
* The aim is to help readers achieve more productivity, well-being, and happiness by creating time for the things that matter most to them.
Who is the author of Make Time?
Jake Knapp is the inventor of the Design Sprint and a New York Times bestselling author. Previously, Jake built products like Microsoft Encarta and Gmail and co-founded Google Meet.
John Zeratsky has written for the Wall Street Journal, Time, Harvard Business Review, Wired, Fast Company, and many more publications. For nearly fifteen years, he was a designer at technology companies, including YouTube and Google Ventures.
Favorite Quote: “Every time you check your email or another message service, you’re basically saying, “Does any random person need my time right now?” - Make Time Quotes, Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky
Make Time Summary Notes
Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky: Reclaiming Your Life from Distraction and Busyness
Do you often feel like there’s not enough time in the day to do what you really want to do? According to Make Time, this feeling is partially self-imposed. The book describes two phenomena that contribute to this: the Busy Bandwagon and the rise of Infinity Pools. The Busy Bandwagon is the pressure to constantly be productive, leading to overloaded schedules and never-ending to-do lists. The Infinity Pools, such as social media and streaming services, provide a constant source of distractions that consume our time.
The problem is that these two phenomena have joined forces, making it difficult to escape the cycle of busyness and distractions. However, the book offers solutions on how to escape this cycle and reclaim your time. The authors suggest what not to do, such as relying on willpower alone or trying to multitask, and provide actionable steps on what to do, such as setting priorities and designing your environment to reduce distractions.
Make Time encourages readers to take control of their time and live a more intentional and fulfilling life. By making small changes to our daily habits, we can break free from the Busy Bandwagon and Infinity Pools and find more time for the things that truly matter.
Why Productivity Alone Leads to More Busyness and Less Time for Yourself
The modern world glorifies busyness and productivity, but this constant pursuit of getting more done in less time can actually lead to more stress and less time for yourself. Many people turn to various organizational systems and productivity hacks to try to squeeze more work into their day. However, the more you get done, the more tasks pile up, creating an endless cycle of busyness.
This constant cycle of busyness not only creates stress and exhaustion but also leads to the deprioritization of personal passions and projects. By focusing on other people’s priorities and tasks, individuals lose time and energy for their own passions and projects. This can lead to a postponement of personal goals, which in turn creates more stress and frustration.
Moreover, this constant pursuit of productivity can lead to a dependency on Infinity Pools of distraction, such as social media and entertainment platforms. Exhausted by the constant demands of productivity, individuals turn to these platforms to decompress, but ultimately end up wasting more time and feeling unfulfilled.
To break free from this cycle of busyness, it’s important to prioritize personal passions and goals and to set boundaries for work and leisure time. This means learning to say no to tasks that don’t align with personal priorities and making time for self-care and relaxation. By doing so, individuals can regain control of their time and live a more fulfilling life.
Willpower Alone Is Not Enough to Escape Distractions.
We all have the intention to stay focused on our work and avoid getting sidetracked by social media, email, or other distractions. But despite our good intentions, we often find ourselves drawn into the endless content of "Infinity Pools" of distraction like Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. Why is it so hard to resist these distractions? It turns out that these apps are expertly designed to capture our attention, and our brains are hardwired to be distractible. Our ancestors needed to be alert to sudden changes in their environment to survive, and they were also fascinated by stories, gossip, and social status. Furthermore, unpredictable rewards motivated them to keep searching for food. These prehistoric predispositions now make us vulnerable to phone notifications, clickbait headlines, Instagram follower counts, and Facebook feeds.
Our willpower alone is not enough to resist the temptation of these distractions. The tech companies that make these apps are motivated by profits and use complex data measurement techniques to make them irresistible. They can churn through iterations of their apps until they find the one that captures our eyeballs. To overcome these distractions, we need strategies and tactics that are more powerful than our willpower. We need to create barriers to entry to the Infinity Pools, like deleting apps, blocking websites, or setting up a separate device for work. We also need to have a clear sense of our priorities and our most important tasks (MITs) for the day. By setting aside dedicated time for our MITs and using time blocks, we can make progress on our most important work and feel less guilty about taking a break to check social media.
Changing Default Settings for Overcoming Busyness and Distractions
The book emphasizes the importance of changing the default settings of our behavior to overcome the busyness and distractions that often dominate our lives. The main problem lies in our unmindful reactivity to external stimuli, which has become our automatic response to demands and technology. This is similar to how phones have default settings, and we can change them to suit our preferences. By cultivating mindful proactivity and consciously reprogramming our default settings, we can escape the clutches of the Busy Bandwagon and Infinity Pools that thrive on our unmindful reactivity.
Overcoming Busyness and Distractions with Mindful Proactivity and Tactical Strategies
One of the main themes of this Make Time book summary is to help readers overcome the common obstacles of busyness and distractions through mindful proactivity and tactical strategies. The book emphasizes that relying solely on willpower and productivity is not enough to break the cycle of reactive behavior to external stimuli, which leads to wasted time and a lack of productivity. Instead, the author suggests that creating barriers between oneself and time-wasters is crucial, and provides tactics such as website blockers to help with this.
However, the book also emphasizes that simply listing tactics is not enough, and that a strategy is necessary to guide them. The strategy presented is broken down into four steps: highlight, focus, energize, and reflect. By following this strategy, readers can find a set of personalized tactics that work for them and enable them to avoid the modern distractions that lure them away from productivity. The book draws on examples from literature, such as Odysseus' tactics against the Sirens, to provide relatable and inspiring stories to support its ideas.
Making Time: Finding the Sweet Spot Between Short-term and Long-term Goals
Do you find yourself constantly busy and never able to make time for what truly matters to you? The solution may not be in just getting more things done efficiently or focusing solely on long-term goals. The key may be in finding a daily highlight, a sustained activity or project that you can focus on and look back on with satisfaction at the end of the day. This goal should be something that you can accomplish today and also serves as a guiding star as you navigate towards your long-term goals.
While short-term tasks and long-term goals are important, they are not enough to help you regain your time. Short-term tasks can feed into the Busy Bandwagon, leaving you feeling exhausted at the end of the day, while long-term goals may be too abstract and focused on the distant future. By finding your daily highlight, you can create a balance between these two and feel a sense of accomplishment every day.
To find your daily highlight, ask yourself what you want the highlight of your day to be. This question may be difficult to answer, but it can help you to identify what truly matters to you and what you want to focus on. By having a daily highlight, you can prioritize your time and avoid getting lost in the never-ending to-do list.
Making Time for What Matters: Choosing Daily Highlights
Do you ever feel like you're constantly busy but never really accomplish anything meaningful or satisfying? If so, it may be time to start focusing on daily highlights. These are sustained activities or projects that you can look back on with satisfaction at the end of the day. But how do you choose a highlight that will truly make a difference in your life?
According to the Make Time framework, there are three basic flavors of highlights: important, meaningful, and joyful. Important highlights are the most urgent and necessary activities or projects that you need to complete that day. These could be client proposals, important meetings, or helping your child with their homework. To make an important highlight truly effective, it should take 60 to 90 minutes of sustained focus.
Meaningful highlights are projects that you want to do but may not be time-sensitive. These are typically things that will bring you a sense of satisfaction or accomplishment. For example, you may want to work on a pet project at work or research potential vacation destinations. The key is to choose something that is important to you and that will take around 60 to 90 minutes to complete.
Finally, joyful highlights are activities that bring you pure pleasure and enjoyment. These could be anything from learning a new song on the guitar to reading a book. The goal is to choose something that will bring you joy and help you live a fuller and more enjoyable life.
The key to choosing a daily highlight is to trust your gut and choose whichever approach feels right to you that day. By focusing on a daily highlight, you can make progress on the things that truly matter to you, rather than just going through the motions of a busy day. By taking the time to choose a highlight, you can ensure that you are making time for what matters most in your life.
Tactics to Help You Choose Your Highlights
Choosing a highlight for the day can be a daunting task, but there are tactics that can help. One approach is to write down a list of priorities and rank them to identify the highest priority item. Another tactic is to repeat yesterday's highlight or combine small tasks into one larger task for a sense of accomplishment. You can also review your to-do list and choose the task that matters most to you. Lastly, you can break a longer project into smaller steps and make it a multi-day highlight. It's important to try out these tactics to see what works best for you and not get overwhelmed by attempting all of them at once. By implementing these tactics, you can more easily choose a highlight for the day and accomplish something meaningful or joyful within 60-90 minutes. The next step is to actually do the highlight, which will be covered in the next book summary.
Tactics for Making Time for Your Highlights
Now that you've identified your highlights, the challenge is to find time for them in your day. In this Make Time key idea, the authors provide some tactics to help you make time for your highlights. One approach is to estimate how long your highlight will take and schedule it into your day or block off a regular space of time on your schedule for doing highlights. Alternatively, you can break down your day into a detailed schedule, even half-hour by half-hour, to make sure you have time for your highlight.
To create more time for yourself, consider shifting around your commitments or getting out of them if possible. Additionally, becoming a morning person or a more effective night owl can also give you more time. To become a morning person, it helps to replicate the conditions of our ancestors' lives by dimming the lights of your home a couple of hours before bed, switching off screened devices when you're in the bedroom, and using a dawn simulator to provide yourself with plenty of light when you wake up early.
On the other hand, to become a more effective night owl, try setting aside time for your highlight in the late evening or early night. Before your highlight time, do something that recharges you and stay offline to keep focused.
Tactics for Staying Focused on Your Priorities
In this Make Time Key Idea, the focus is on tactics for staying focused on your priorities and avoiding distractions. The author suggests deleting distracting apps like Twitter and Facebook or even the email app from your phone. Instead, install software and website blocking programs to limit the amount of time you can use social media or email on your computer. Logging out of social media accounts can also help to avoid unnecessary usage. The author also suggests catching up on the news once a week and writing down random questions for later instead of Googling them immediately.
These tactics are intended to help individuals avoid distractions and create more time for the things that matter most to them. However, the author also notes that it's important to ensure that you're energized enough to take advantage of the extra time. With the right tactics, individuals can create more focused and intentional use of their time and increase their productivity towards their priorities.
Prioritize Your Body to Boost Your Mind's Energy.
The mind and body are not separate entities, but rather interconnected aspects of a human being. Yet, modern society often encourages people to prioritize their mental tasks and neglect their physical needs. This leads to a range of negative consequences, including decreased energy levels and productivity. To boost your mind's energy, you need to prioritize taking care of your body.
The human body has evolved over thousands of years to thrive on a varied and sparse diet, regular sleep patterns that coincide with natural light rhythms, social interaction, and constant low-key movement interspersed with more intense activity. However, modern lifestyles often involve prolonged sitting, processed food consumption, and erratic sleep patterns, which disrupt these natural rhythms.
To care for your body and, in turn, boost your mental energy, you need to prioritize habits that align with your evolutionary needs while retaining the benefits of modern life. This doesn't mean adopting an extreme diet or lifestyle but rather creating healthy habits that support your physical and mental well-being.
Some ways to prioritize your body include exercising regularly, eating a balanced diet, getting enough sleep, and incorporating movement into your daily routine. These simple changes can help improve your energy levels, focus, and productivity. By prioritizing your body, you can achieve greater success in all areas of your life.
Energize Your Mind and Body with These Simple Tactics
In today's fast-paced world, it's easy to neglect our physical and mental well-being. However, by implementing simple tactics into our daily routine, we can improve our energy levels and overall health. The key factors for taking care of our minds and bodies are exercise, diet, social connection, and sleep.
Regarding exercise, 20 minutes of daily activity such as running or swimming can have significant benefits for our cognitive abilities, mood, and overall health. If short on time, seven minutes of high-intensity interval training can be even more effective than an hour of gentle exercise. By combining sprints, push-ups, pull-ups, squats, and lifting weights, we can squeeze in a re-energizing workout in just five to ten minutes.
When it comes to diet, moderation is key. Eat real food like plants, nuts, fish, and meat, and use a simple trick of filling your plate with salad first to make serving sizes smaller without feeling deprived. Caffeine crashes can also negatively impact energy levels, so it's best to re-caffeinate about 30 minutes before a crash to avoid the army of drowsiness-inducing molecules.
Sleep is also crucial, and it's important to stick to a sleep schedule by waking up at the same time every day, even on weekends. Social connection is another essential factor, and spending time with friends, colleagues, and extended family can help fulfill our innate need to socialize. Sharing a healthy meal with loved ones can also help avoid distractions and improve our well-being.
Reflecting on the Results of Make Time Tactics
One of the main themes of the book is to reflect on the results of trying out the tactics provided in the book summary. With 20 tactics to choose from, it can be overwhelming to decide which ones to implement, but the authors suggest trying them out one at a time, like recipes in a cookbook. The point is to see which tactics work for you and to test them out, record the results, and analyze what worked and what didn't.
To keep track of your progress, the authors suggest taking a few moments every day to note your highlight, which tactics you used, what worked and didn't work, what changes you could make, and which tactics you'll use the next day. Additionally, you can rate your focus and energy levels on a scale of 1 to 10 and write down a moment for which you feel grateful. This not only helps you keep track of how you're doing but also helps you focus on the positive developments in your life.
Book Details
- Print length: 287 pages
- Genre: Nonfiction, Self Help, Productivity
What is a good quote from Make Time?
Top Quote: “Every time you check your email or another message service, you’re basically saying, “Does any random person need my time right now?” (Meaning) - Make Time Quotes, Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky
What do critics say?
Here's what one of the prominent reviewers had to say about the book: “As someone obsessed with time and how to spend it wisely, I loved this fun and useful book. Not your normal productivity fare.” — Ev Williams, founder of Medium and Twitter
* The editor of this summary review made every effort to maintain information accuracy, including any published quotes, chapters, or takeaways. If you're interested in furthering your personal development, I invite you to check out my list of favorite personal development books page. On this page, you'll find a curated list of books that have personally impacted my life, each with a summary and key lessons.
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
