Learn a great way to make each day count, and prevent your weeks from becoming a blur of busyness and distraction.
As creators of Google Ventures’ renowned “design sprint”, Jake and John have helped hundreds of teams solve important problems by changing how they work. They spent years experimenting with their own habits and routines, looking for ways to help people optimize their energy, focus, and time.
They’ve packaged the most effective tactics into a four-step daily framework that anyone can use to systematically design their days. Make Time is not a one-size-fits-all formula. Instead, it offers a customizable menu of bite-size tips and strategies that can be tailored to individual habits and lifestyles.
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.
Make Time will help you stop passively reacting to the demands of the modern world and start intentionally making time for the things that matter.
Animated Video Summary by Productivity Game
Key Takeaways
"Even if you don't completely control your own schedule—and few of us do—you absolutely can control your attention."
How did you spend your time last week? When you think back does your week seem like a blur like a dream you can barely remember if so it’s probably because you spent the entire week on the busy bandwagon.
The Busy Bandwagon
The Busy Bandwagon is a cultural belief that if you’re not busy—that is you’re not running around like a chicken with your head cut off—then you’re doing something wrong.
At work when you ask someone how they’re doing, they’ll probably tell you: busy really, really, busy. People wear their busyness like a badge of honor. So to avoid feeling left out, you and I hop on the busy bandwagon and spend our whole day responding to emails, running from meeting to meeting and constantly adding tasks to our to-do lists.
Infinity Pools
When we step off the busy bandwagon to relax infinity pools are waiting to pull us into their vortex.
Infinity pools are apps and other sources of endlessly replenishing content. If you can pull to refresh, it’s an infinity pool. If it streams, it’s an infinity pool.
Define a Daily Highlight
To prevent the busy bandwagon and infinity pools from turning our daily lives into a blur of meaningless activity, we must learn to live more intentionally, and to live more intentionally, we need to focus on daily highlights.
- To illustrate the power of a daily highlight imagine, taking a trip to Disneyland with your family. After a long drive you pay too much to get in, you wait in long lines in the heat, you deal with screaming kids, and you eat greasy food that makes you feel like crap—but then there’s that one moment that one peak moment of joy the ride on Splash Mountain with your daughter in which you both got soaked that makes your time at Disneyland worthwhile.
We tend to remember peak moments—not entire experiences—so over the course of a busy day, we can answer 100 emails, we can complete 20 errands, but if we don’t have a big win a peak moment a highlight, then our day will seem just like every other day in our weeks and months will become a blur.
To make our days more meaningful we need to define a daily highlight before our day begins.
To define your daily highlight, imagine a friend calls you at the end of the day and asks what was the highlight of your day. If you can answer that question before the day begins, you give yourself the best opportunity to experience a peak moment and stop your weeks and months from becoming a blur of business and mindless distraction.
By establishing your daily highlight, you’ll be able to look back on your week and think…”ah Monday was great because I did this one big thing, Tuesday was great because I made time to hang out with my child, which led to that one memorable moment.”
Daily Highlight Categories
1. Urgency
To find a highlight in the urgency category ask yourself: what’s the most pressing thing I need to do today?
- Like that proposal you promised a client.
- Or that test you need to study for.
- Of all the urgent things in your life, what could you make progress on that would make your day feel like a win?
2. Satisfaction
When searching the satisfaction category for a potential daily highlight ask yourself: at the end of the day what would give me the most satisfaction?
- Maybe that’s drafting 2,000 words for that book you want to write
- Or completing the first module of that computer programming course you wanted to start.
- These are things you want to do, but don’t necessarily need to do.
3. Joy
In the joy category you can find your daily highlight by asking yourself: when I reflect on my day, what experience will give me the most joy?
Here you stop searching for things you can accomplish and start identifying the people you love to spend time with in activities that bring you joy—that is activities you do for the sake of doing them.
- Joy based highlights might include going to the playground with your child, having a guitar jam session with your friend or taking a cooking class with your spouse.
"Might-Do" List
As you consider all three categories urgency, satisfaction, and joy, write down all the potential highlights on a blank piece of paper in no particular order. This piece of paper is your “might do” list.
- Each item on your might do list should be bigger than a task, but smaller than a major project.
- Each item should take between 60 to 90 minutes to complete.
Once you have a few good options on your daily might do list, rewrite the items that you think will make your day memorable on a new list, then circle the one highlight you want to focus on today. Now put that highlight on a post-it note, and put that post-it note in a place you’ll see throughout the day.
- I like to use post-it note tape. Every morning I rip off a piece, write my highlight on it and then paste it to the back of my phone. Every time I pull my phone out of my pocket, I’m reminded of my highlight.
The final step is to open up your calendar and block out a 60 to 90 minute chunk of time that you’ll dedicate to your highlight. By identifying and focusing on one highlight each day, you’ll start living more intentionally and you’ll increase the probability that each day will count.
Three "Make Time" Tactics
However you still need to prevent the busy bandwagon and infinity pools from pulling you away from your highlight. To help with this, there are several tactics in make time to block the busy bandwagon and tame the infinity pools.
1. Send only email
The biggest source of busyness is email—particularly email on your phone. Because emails so easy to access on our phone, we feel the urge to check it throughout the day, and when we’re focusing on our highlight—like cooking with our family, practicing guitar, or writing a blog post—our attention is fractured and what’s worse if a highlight becomes hard—like creating an outline for an important presentation—then we’ll quickly escape to our inbox.
- The easiest solution is to simply delete the email app on our phone. But if you’re like me and you think that’s too hasty because you need to communicate with your team or send updates to somebody, then there is a better way remove the primary email account from your phone but set up a secondary send only email account on your phone.
- When you need to send an email message, open up that secondary email on your phone and send away, then when someone replies to you, set up Auto forwarding to your primary account that’s not on your phone, this way you won’t be tempted to check email on your phone because there is no email coming in and you’ll be forced to check your email on your desktop where it’s actually faster to respond to all your email because you’ve access to your files and you can type out responses.
2. Near impossible logins
Infinity pools are powerful because they’re so frictionless. To access YouTube or Instagram on the iPhone you just need to hold the phone to your face and hit the app icon.
To add more friction to infinity pools and reduce their pole execute the following three steps:
Step 1 Remove all apps on your phone that you have the urge to check, like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, news apps and any other apps you feel that you overuse. Now that they’re off your phone you’ll need to log into these services on our desktop.
Step 2 Reset all your passwords so they’re all different and they’re all crazy—like C$!RFQ8ep *._e4. Then save all your crazy passwords in a password manager like keeper.
Step 3 Uncheck the option to save passwords on every service. Now when you try to log into Facebook or Instagram or YouTube, you need to make an effort, and you get a chance to stop yourself mid login and think “is this how I really want to spend my time?” If so go ahead. If not, get back to your highlight.
3. Install a kill switch
For a lot of people the best time to experience a highlight is in the evening, however the evening is usually the time we waste hours in an infinity pool like Netflix. To protect our time, we need to kill the primary source of busyness and distraction: the internet
The best way to kill the Internet is to not think about doing it and have a vacation timer do it automatically. A vacation timer is a device you plug into your outlet which you then plug your internet modem into, then you can set the vacation timer to kill power to the modem at a specific time every day.
- I set my vacation timer to kill the internet between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. now between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. I can’t watch TV because my TV’s internet-based and I can’t wait hours browsing websites on my laptop, sure I can still use my phone but that’s why I use an app called freedom which I’ve set to block access to all web sites between 8:00p.m. and 8:00 a.m. the result is more quality time with my wife, more time reading and more time on my passion projects and better sleep.