Make Time Book Summary - Make Time Book explained in key points

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Make Time summary

Name: Make Time
Rating: 4.4 (246 reviews)
Author: Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky

Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky

How to Focus on What Matters Every Day

4.4 (246 ratings)

35 mins

Table of Contents

Make Time
summarized in 13 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 13

What’s in it for me? Reclaim your time from busyness and distractions to do the things you really care about.

In modern life, it often feels like there are never enough hours in the day to do the things we really want to do. If we’re honest with ourselves, though, we’ll see that the culprit isn’t just the modern world; it’s also ourselves. We often make ourselves busier than we have to be. Then, when we’re done being busy, we spend the rest of our time glued to social media, television and email!

To regain our time and pursue the activities and projects we’ve been putting on the backburner, the solution, it would seem, is simple: stop being busier than we have to be, and avoid the distractions that are whittling our days away. Of course, these things are much easier said than done. If we want a real fighting chance of doing them, we’re going to need to understand the underlying causes of busyness and distraction. Then, we must implement a strategy to overcome them. To bring that strategy to life, we’ll need some practical tactics.

Over the course of these blinks, we’ll look at why we’re so busy and distracted, why productivity and willpower alone aren’t enough to solve the problem and how to develop a four-step strategy to regain our time. To implement that strategy, we’ll then look at a sampling of 20 of the authors’ 87 time-making tactics, which you can use to create a personalized approach to taking back your life.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

the identities and hidden nature of the dynamic duo of time-wasting super villains: the Busy Bandwagon and the Infinity Pool;
why striving to be more productive can make you feel like you’re just running faster on a hamster wheel; and
a nifty trick for avoiding caffeine crashes.

We lose our time to busyness and distractions.

Why do we feel like there’s never enough time to do the things we really want to do? The simple answer would seem to be that there’s just too much to do on any given day – too many emails to answer, too many meetings to attend, too many Facebook posts to keep up with. But that’s only partially true. The full truth is that our lack of time is, to some extent, self-imposed.

There are two phenomena at work here. The first is the Busy Bandwagon. This is the modern mindset that tells us that we must squeeze as much work as possible into every moment of the day. It urges us to be constantly productive, resulting in overloaded inboxes, jam-packed calendars and never-ending to-do lists.

The second phenomenon is the rise of Infinity Pools. Unless you’ve been hiding in an underground bunker for the past decade, you’re most likely already familiar with these. Think Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Netflix and news websites. Instantly available with a mere tap of the screen or click of the mouse, they’re essentially apps and other digital sources of limitless, inexhaustible, constantly-replenishing content – whether it be information, entertainment or a bit of both.

As anyone who has encountered them knows first-hand, these Infinity Pools can be quite the time wasters – and statistics back this up. On average, we spend four hours watching television and another four hours staring at our smartphones per day – the equivalent of a full-time job! Now, combine that second job with our actual full-time jobs, which are hectic enough by themselves and often spill into our non-work hours because of the Busy Bandwagon. Well, it’s clear where all the time goes, right?

What’s worse is that the Busy Bandwagon and Infinity Pools have joined forces to become a tag-teaming duo of time destroyers. Exhausted by the Busy Bandwagon, we’re easily enticed into plunging into the Infinity Pools and passively soaking up their content. The result is endless tasks and endless distractions, with us bouncing back and forth between the two all day long – day in, day out.

So, the question is: How do we escape? Well, that’s what the rest of these blinks are all about! First, we’ll look at what not to do. Then, we’ll look at what to do.

By itself, productivity just leads to more busyness.

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!

Willpower alone cannot save us from distractions.

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.

To overcome busyness and distractions, you need to change the default settings of your behavior.

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.

To change your default settings, you need tactics and a strategy to create barriers between you and your time wasters.

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.

Focus on the present by choosing an activity or project that will be the highlight of your day.

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.

Choose an important, satisfying or joyful highlight that can be accomplished in 60 to 90 minutes.

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.

Try out tactics to help you choose your highlights.

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.

Use tactics to help you make time for your highlights.

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.

Use tactics to avoid distractions and stay focused on your highlights.

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.

Take care of your body to keep your mind energized.

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.

Use tactics to energize your mind and body.

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.

Reflect on the results of trying out these tactics.

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.

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What is Make Time about?

Make Time (2018) promises the seemingly impossible, then actually delivers the goods. These blinks will help you do exactly what the title suggests: make more time. Of course, there are only so many hours in the day, and you can’t generate more of them. What they do provide, though, is an insightful diagnosis of how and why you lose your time to busyness and distractions along with a highly personalizable strategy and a generous buffet of practical tactics for reclaiming it, allowing you to do the things you really want to do in life.

Who should read Make Time?

Professionals who feel frazzled by the busyness of modern life
Social media and smartphone users who feel like their devices and apps own them, rather than the other way around
Quarter, mid and late-life crisis sufferers who sense their lives are slipping by in a busy, distracted blur

About the Author

Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky are both former tech industry insiders who used the strategy and tactics outlined in these blinks to regain their time from their hectic lives and pursue their true passions, which ultimately led to major shifts in their careers.

John dedicated ten years to Google, where he helped build Gmail and Google Hangouts. Jake spent about 15 years as a designer for tech companies such as YouTube. They met at Google Ventures, where they developed a design process that they shared in their New York Times bestselling book Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days. Now, they’re both professional writers, and John devotes part of his year to his passion for long-distance sailing.

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