Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky

Overall rating: 8/10
Will I re-read? Yes

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Overall thoughts:

Make Time is the second book of Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, following the successful Sprint (buy Sprint!). In Sprint the focus is on generating great ideas as a group while in Make Time Jake and John transferred lessons they learned from Sprint sessions into daily life.

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This book is not a regular productivity book, and it does not teach you how to be more productive. Jake and John believe that productivity is a fallacy. By definition, productivity refers to the amount of work you can generate within a unit time. What it describes is how fast you can finish the work, but not how impactful or effective your work actually is.

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Make Time on the contrary focuses on identifying the real important things, and making time for those things. The book introduces four important steps of making time- Highlight, Laser, Energize, and Reflect. They also shared about 90 tactics that are derived from their personal experience as well as evolutionary psychology.

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Highlight

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Highlight is more than prioritization.

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The idea is intuitive.

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Making time for important things means to reduce time on unimportant things. Finding a highlight is to re-focus attention to the important things. Making the decision for the day saves cognitive energy of making tiny decisions along the way.

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A highlight can be something that brings urgency, satisfaction, or joy. The general idea is that, when you finish the highlight, you can go to bed, or continue with your day knowing that you’ve accomplished something important.

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Tactics:

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1. Write it down
2. The burner list

User a burner list to narrow down your main goal for a day - imagine you're cooking and you have 2 and only burners. The most important dish goes to the main burner, and a side dish can go to the second burner. Same applys to work. Only the most important task (or the task you decide to make it highlight today) goes onto the burner. And the rest remains in the sink.

Laser

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When you decide a highlight, the next step is naturally to remove distractions and focus on completing the highlight. It is easier said to be done. If you use a smartphone like most people, you are probably not unfamiliar with losing track of time in social media, or a Netflix series. On top of that there are emails, phone calls, texts, and notifications. Our brain is wired in the way that you will be very alerted towards distractions, which was turned out to be very useful in ancient times.

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At the laser stage, the goal is to acknowledge the fact that we are easily distracted, and to proactively create a distraction-free environment for completing the highlight.

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Tactics:

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They went extreme to have a distraction-free phone.

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22. Leave devices behind
By removing the visual cue of a phone or notification pop ups on the screen, it reduces the urge of checking your phone.

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Borrowing an idea from another book, Why Buddhism is True, when you observe your urge of checking the phone, do not try to burry the urge completely. When you try to push away the urge, it is still there and might come back even stronger. Instead, try to observe it, and simply supply with no action. When there is no action followed the urge, no reward is given, thus no positive association is reinforced.

Energize

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Energize is my favourite part of the book.

Lesson learnt: when I feel tired during the day, maybe I am not really tired. Maybe it was the heavy lunch, stuffy air, or a really focused work session. What I need is not to take the rest of the day off and watch TV, but instead, to take a walk, get some fresh air, take a power nap, do a few push ups, and keep my bedroom work-free.

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Food intake influence energy level too. From an evolutionary perspective, humans crave energy-dense food which are not considered healthy at a modern life. Replacing cookies or chips with dark chocolate if you need to snack; have a light lunch and get caffeine right before a power nap.

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Tactics:

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64. Squeeze in a super short workout
65. Eat like a Hunter-Gatherer

77. Get woodsy

80. Take real breaks

Reflect

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Fine tuning your day with a scientific method:
- observe
- guess
- experiment
- measure
- and keep notes of the result

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And finally, "start 'someday' today".

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