Make Time

Being more productive didn’t mean I was doing the most important work; it only meant I was reacting to other people’s priorities faster. 

“The system.” It was almost mystical. He didn’t know exactly what it was, but he believed it existed: a simple framework for avoiding distractions, maintaining energy, and making more time.

Experimenting allowed us to improve the process, and seeing the results of our changes firsthand gave us a deep confidence that we never could have built just by reading about someone else’s results.

Taking stock of our results each day helped us understand why we tripped up. And this experimental approach also allowed us to be kinder to ourselves when we made mistakes—after all, every mistake was just a data point, and we could always try again tomorrow.

The changes do not require tons of self-discipline. Instead, change comes from resetting defaults, creating barriers, and beginning to design the way you spend your time.

Challenge the standard: by challenging the standard behaviors in our efficiency-obsessed, distraction-saturated world, you can get the best of technology and put yourself back in control. And once you take control, you can change the game.

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.

Charge your battery with exercise, food, sleep, quiet, and face-to-face.

Before going to bed, you’ll take a few notes. It’s super simple: You’ll decide which tactics you want to continue and which ones you want to refine or drop.fn1 And you’ll think back on your energy level, whether you made time for your Highlight, and what brought you joy in the day.

Your version of the Make Time system will be totally personalized, and because you built it yourself, you’ll trust it, and it will fit into your existing lifestyle.

Perfection is a distraction—another shiny object taking your attention away from your real priorities.

Living a “someday” life was demoralizing. In the words of author James Clear, I was essentially saying, “I’m not good enough yet, but I will be when I reach my goal.”

Not too big, not too small: I loved thinking about big, lofty goals and I was good at getting things done hour by hour, but neither was truly satisfying. I was happiest when I had something I could hold on to in the present—a chunk of time that was bigger than a to-do but smaller than a five-year goal. An activity I could plan for, look forward to, and appreciate when it was done. In other words, I needed to make sure every day had a highlight.

You can design your time by choosing where you direct your attention. And your daily Highlight is the target of that attention.

Quality questions:

• What do I want to be the highlight of my day?
• What’s the most pressing thing I have to do today?
• At the end of the day, which Highlight will bring me the most satisfaction?

These (personal) 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.

When I reflect on today, what will bring me the most joy?

You only waste time if you’re not intentional about how you spend it.

The best way to choose a Highlight is to trust your gut to decide whether an urgent, joyful, or satisfying Highlight is best for today.fn2 A good rule of thumb is to choose a Highlight that takes sixty to ninety minutes. If you spend less than sixty minutes, you might not have time to get in the zone, but after ninety minutes of focused attention, most people need a break.

If yesterday’s Highlight brought you joy or satisfaction, hey, there’s nothing wrong with more of that! Repeat to keep the good times rolling. Once you’ve identified something that’s important to you, focusing on it day after day will help it take root in your life, grow, and flourish.

Most to-dos are just reactions to other people’s priorities,

Lists also can obscure what’s really important.

A completely planned day provides the freedom to focus on the moment. Instead of thinking about what to do next, you’re free to focus on how to do it. You can be in the flow, trusting the plan set out by your past self.

On doing a manual ritual in the morning: This process is more labor-intensive than using a machine, but that’s the idea. My slow coffee ritual keeps me occupied during the low-willpower period when I would otherwise check email or look at Twitter, both of which are likely to send me into a reactive vortex of unproductivity. Instead, I stand in the kitchen (or galley), wake up slowly, think about my day, and enjoy a fresh cup of coffee while I settle in to work on my Highlight.

I enjoy dark chocolate after dinner, but I learned the hard way about its surprising caffeine content.

Working till exhaustion makes us more likely to fall behind by robbing us of the rest we need to prioritize and do our best work.

You need to stop and refuel. No matter how long you keep your foot on the accelerator, if the tank is empty, you aren’t going anywhere.

If we ended each workday before people were exhausted, the week’s productivity increased dramatically. Even shortening the day by thirty minutes made a big difference.

As quitting time approaches, think about whether you accomplished your Highlight. If you have, you can rest knowing you made time for the day’s most important job. No matter how much you did or didn’t get done or how many hours you did or didn’t work, you’ll be able to look back on the day with a sense of joy, accomplishment, or satisfaction—or all three!

(The next morning) I’d breeze through and finish in a fraction of the time it would’ve taken me the previous night. Instead of trying to power through when I was running on fumes, I refueled by quitting when I was done. 

In this world, willpower alone is not enough to protect your focus.

It’s in your DNA: Of course we love email, video games, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat—it’s literally in our DNA.

There will always be fierce competition for your attention. You can’t wait for companies or government regulators to give your focus back. If you want control, you have to redesign your own relationship with technology.

The best way to defeat distraction is to make it harder to react.

It’s like compound interest. The longer you remain focused on your Highlight, the more engaging you’ll find it and the better work (or play) you’ll do.

Removing email and other Infinity Pool apps from our phones might be the simplest, most powerful change we’ve made to reclaim time and attention. We’ve both had distraction-free phones since 2012, and not only have we survived, we’ve thrived—becoming more effective in our work and just generally enjoying our days more.

Adding friction is the key to avoiding Infinity Pools and staying in Laser mode. (I) store my passwords in a password manager app so that I can sign in if necessary, but it’s intentionally a hassle. 

Leaving your devices behind is a helpful tactic when you want to make time for an “offline” Highlight like reading to your kids or working on a project with your hands.

Most news is bad news. “If it bleeds, it leads” is a newsroom cliché, but it’s true.  

The important thing is to disconnect from the 24/7 breaking news cycle. It can be a tough distraction to shake, but it’s also a big opportunity to make time (and preserve emotional energy) for what really matters in your daily life.

Your real life begins after putting your house in order. —MARIE KONDO

Now picture this: You grab your laptop, flip open the screen, and then … you see a beautiful photograph on your desktop and nothing else. No messages. No browser tabs. You signed out of email and chat at the end of the day yesterday, confident that if something urgent came up overnight, someone would call or text you. The silence is blissful. You’re ready to rock.

Reacting to what’s in front of you is always easier than doing what you intend. And when they’re staring you right in the face, tasks such as checking email, responding to a chat, and reading the news feel urgent and important—but they rarely are.

Like a well-behaved kid, clean up after yourself when you’re done. Take it a step further and hide the bookmarks bar in your browser (we know you’ve got a couple of Infinity Pools in there) and configure your browser settings so that your homepage is something unobtrusive

It’s much more effective to lock yourself out. Switching off the Wi-Fi on your laptop and putting your phone in airplane mode … those methods are simple to undo. 

Plug your Internet router into a simple vacation timer (the kind you use to trick would-be thieves by turning on the lights when you’re out of town) and set it to click off at 6 a.m., 9 p.m., or whatever time you want to get into Laser mode to work on your

It’s not just Infinity Pools that create time craters. There’s also recovery time. A “quick” fifteen-minute burrito lunch might cost an extra three hours of food coma. A late night watching TV might cost you an hour of sleeping in and a whole day of low energy.

Where are the time craters in your life? That’s up to you to figure out. You can’t avoid them all, but you can definitely dodge some of them, and every time you do, you’ll make time.

 

Checking mail always feels like an accomplishment even when there’s nothing new. “Good,” says your brain. “I’m on top of things!”

Email was the work. It was a vicious cycle: The faster we replied, the more replies we got back and the more we strengthened the expectation of immediate responses.

Deal with email at the end of the day. That way, you can use your prime hours for your Highlight and other important work. You’ll probably have a little less energy at the end of the day, but that is actually a good thing when it comes to email: You’ll be less tempted to overcommit by saying yes to every incoming request and less likely to bang out a multipage manifesto when a simple reply would do.

 

Empty email inbox, a weekly goal: As long as he gets to everything by the end of the week, he’s good. Give it a try. You can still skim your inbox for messages that really require a faster response, but respond only to those.

 

Every time you check your email or another message service, you’re basically saying, “Does any random person need my time right now?” And if you respond right away, you’re sending another signal both to them and to yourself: “I’ll stop what I’m doing to put other people’s priorities ahead of mine no matter who they are or what they want.”

 

Believe in your Highlight: It is worth prioritizing over random disruption. Believe in Laser mode: You will accomplish more with a singular focus than by ricocheting through your inbox. And believe in other people: If their thing is really and truly urgent and important, they will track you down in person or on the phone.

“I’m slow to respond because I need to prioritize some important projects, but if your message is urgent, send me a text.”

We were just slow, and people figured it out. That gave us more time for our design sprints and more time to write.

Some work—such as sales and customer support—really does require fast responses. But in most jobs, any reputational damage you might suffer by being slow (probably less than you think) will be more than compensated for by the increase in time for your most meaningful work.

The closed door is your way of telling the world and yourself that you mean business. —STEPHEN KING, ON WRITING

Shifting your focus to something that your mind perceives as a doable, completable task will create a real increase in positive energy, direction, and motivation.

He doesn’t play the songs at other times—they’re reserved for these special activities. So after a few repetitions, the music becomes part of the habit loop, cuing his brain to get into a distinct version of Laser mode.

If you use the Time Timer when you’re getting into Laser mode, you’ll feel an instant, visceral sense of urgency in a totally good way.

Pen & paper: In our design sprints, we found that we did better work when we turned off our laptops and used pens and paper instead. And the same is true for your personal projects.

On paper, you can do anything at all. Next time you’re struggling to get into Laser mode, put away your computer or tablet and pick up a pen.

Instead of reacting to every twitch, write your questions on a piece of paper (How much do wool socks cost on Amazon? Any Facebook updates?). Then you can stay in Laser mode, secure in the knowledge that those pressing topics have been captured for future research.

Even a pause that lasts only one breath can bring your attention back to where you want it—on your Highlight.

Bored test subjects were better at creative problem solving than were their nonbored peers.

Just be stuck. Don’t give up. Stare at the blank screen, or switch to paper, or walk around, but keep your focus on the project at hand. Even when your conscious mind feels frustrated, some quiet part of your brain is processing and making progress. Eventually, you will get unstuck, and then you’ll be glad you didn’t give up.

The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness. (not necessarily rest) This is what I experienced that evening when I deleted everything on my phone. Before, I had been splitting my attention between playing with my kids and looking at my phone. I was holding back and conserving energy. But when I went all in and threw myself wholeheartedly into assembling the wooden train track and making choo-choo noises, the tiredness went away.

So far in this book, we’ve talked about ways to make time by choosing where to focus your effort, adjusting your calendar and devices, and blocking out distractions to boost attention.

When you don’t take care of your body, your brain can’t do its job. If you’ve ever felt sluggish and uninspired after a big lunch or invigorated and clearheaded after exercising, you know what we mean. If you want energy for your brain, you need to take care of your body.

Homo sapiens evolved to be hunter-gatherers, not screen tappers and pencil pushers. Prehistoric humans ate a variety of foods and often waited all day (or longer) for a proper meal.

We’re still wired for a lifestyle of constant movement, varied but relatively sparse diets, ample quiet, plenty of face-to-face time, and restful sleep that’s aligned with the rhythm of the day.

We are “the cave man”: Underneath our smartwatches, fancy haircuts, and factory-made designer jeans, we’re Urk.

In Urk’s world, almost nothing ever happened. Except for the occasional run-in with a mastodon, there was no breaking news. Quiet was the norm, and humans evolved to not only tolerate silence but use it for productive thought or focused work. Today’s constant noise and distractions are a disaster for your energy and your attention span. We’ll show you easy ways to find moments of quiet, like taking a break without screens and leaving your headphones at home.

Making the shift to daily doable exercise might mean giving up bragging rights. It might mean letting go of the ideal activity in favor of the workout you can actually do consistently. Making this mental shift is tough. We can’t do it for you, but we can give you permission: It’s okay to not be perfect. There is more to you than how you sweat.

I feel better on days when I exercise a little: less stressed, more energetic, and generally happier. And unlike the heroic efforts, this right-size everyday exercise routine is sustainable. Running or walking became a real habit—eventually, it kind of went on autopilot.

Walking is practically a wonder drug. Walking is really, really darned good for you.

Walking helps make time you can use to think, daydream, or meditate. JZ often uses walk time to plan and think about his Highlight. Sometimes he starts drafting a new chapter, blog post, or story in his head. But there’s no reason walking has to be Zen time. You can listen to podcasts or audiobooks while you walk. You can even talk on the phone.

If you change the default from “ride when possible” to “walk when possible,” you’ll see opportunities everywhere.

Click here for a list of useful tools recommended in the book.