Make Time summary

As the Busy Bandwagon careens down the road of modern life, it’s followed by a procession of gurus hawking various organizational systems, each promising you a more productive way of getting your work done.

The thinking behind these systems follows a pretty simple formula. You have a certain quantity of work to do; let’s call it X. If X amount of work fills up all of your time, then the solution seems simple: do X faster to have more spare time!

If you don’t want to get stuck in an Infinity Pool of distraction, like Facebook or Twitter, couldn’t you just refrain from entering the pool in the first place? Use your willpower and just say no?

Unfortunately, the idea of “just saying no” is wishful thinking. Infinity Pools have been expertly designed to overpower your resistance and suck you into their endless content. The companies that make them have a vested interest in doing so. The more you use their apps, the more money they make.

If willpower alone isn’t enough to defeat Infinity Pools, and if productivity just makes the Busy Bandwagon stronger, how do we escape their clutches? Well, as with vanquishing a supervillain, the answer lies in identifying the ultimate source of their superpower and taking it away from them.

That source can be summarized in one word: reactivity. Both the Busy Bandwagon and Infinity Pools derive their power from our being unmindfully reactive to external stimuli. A colleague emails you with a question, and you feel obligated to respond to it immediately. Your phone buzzes with a notification, and you feel compelled to look at the screen.

In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus faces his own version of Infinity Pools: the Sirens. They are winged creatures whose bewitching voices lured sailors into crashing into the rocks from which they sang. Sailing toward them, Odysseus was mindful of his own limitations. He knew he couldn’t resist the sirens by sheer willpower.

Wanting to hear the Sirens’ songs, but not wanting to crash into the rocks, Odysseus came up with a simple but brilliant solution. He proactively tied himself to the mast of his ship and made his sailors put beeswax in their ears, so they couldn’t react to the Sirens’ song.

As you’ve seen, just being more productive doesn’t solve the problem of being too busy. In fact, because your to-do list is never-ending, it can make the problem even worse by feeding into the Busy Bandwagon.

You’re not going to save yourself time to do what you really want to do by giving yourself more and more short-term tasks. It also doesn’t work to get as much done as possible or to neurotically manage your schedule to complete tasks as efficiently as possible. Instead, you’re just going to make yourself more busy, which makes your days fly by in a blur and leaves you exhausted by the time you’re done with work and chores – hardly ready to, say, write the novel you’ve always wanted to write or spend some quality time with your family.

Like Neapolitan ice cream, highlights come in three basic flavors: important, meaningful and joyful. Each entails its own approach, so let’s go through them one-by-one.

For the first approach, ask yourself, “what – if anything – is my most urgent, absolutely necessary activity or project today?” To find these highlights, take a look at your to-do list, your email inbox or your calendar. Maybe you have a client expecting a proposal today, or your daughter needs help with her costume for Halloween tonight.

You might still need assistance with choosing your highlights. In a moment, we’ll look at some potentially helpful tactics. But first, let’s go over some advice on how to implement them.

In a nutshell, don’t try doing all of these tactics at once. You’ll get overwhelmed and probably just give up. That’s because there are way too many tactics to do in one go! Moreover, you’re not meant to do all of them, you’re just supposed to try some of them out. See which ones do and don’t work for you then keep the ones that work and get rid of the rest.

It’s one thing to come up with a not-too-little, not-too-big goal and declare, “today, this will be the highlight of my day.” It’s another to get around to actually doing it. For that, you need to make time for your highlight. Here are some tactics that can help.

You can estimate how long your highlight will take to accomplish and schedule it into your day.

Now that we’ve seen some ways to make time for our highlights, let’s look at some tactics for staying focused on them, avoiding distractions and actually making use of that time.

First, you can delete Infinity Pool cellphone apps like Twitter and Facebook. Don’t worry, you’ll still have access to your maps, music and the other useful apps.

In the modern world, people often act as if the mind were separate from the body, as if the body’s purpose were to carry around the mind. Meanwhile, you busy yourself primarily with the mental tasks of contemporary life, such as navigating computer screens.

Of course, anyone with a body knows this isn’t true. Whenever you feel mentally sluggish after eating too much food or clear-minded after exercising, you experience the connection between the mind and body firsthand. So it’s clear that caring for the one requires caring for the other.

Like the key factors of our prehistoric ancestors’ lifestyles, the tactics for taking care of our minds and bodies can be broken down into four categories: exercise, diet, social connection and sleep. We’ll look at one or two tactics for each of these.

For exercise, remember that we don’t need to do a triathlon or anything extreme like that. Just 20 minutes of modest, daily activity, such as running or swimming, is scientifically proven to have important benefits for our cognitive abilities, mood and overall health.

In total, these blinks have given you 20 tactics for implementing the first three steps of the Make Time strategy: highlight, focus and energize. That’s a lot of tactics to try out!

With so many tactics to choose from, you might feel overwhelmed. Even if you remember the advice about just trying out one new tactic at a time, it might still feel like there’s so much you’re not covering.