Key Takeaways from Make Time

• Make Time is about making time for the things that matter to us. It’s about changing our defaults so that we spend our time more intentionally.
• The authors set out a four-step approach:
  • Highlight. Every day, pick the thing you most want to get done that day. It could be a work highlight or a personal one (e.g. spending time with family).
  • Laser. Focus on your highlight. The authors suggest a variety of tactics to help with this, such as turning off notifications on your phone and getting a wristwatch.
  • Energise. We get more energy by taking care of our bodies—exercising, eating well, socialising, and resting. While this may all sound obvious, again, the authors include practical tips to make this easier to implement.
  • Reflect. Keep records of which tactics you used and how well you were able to focus on your Highlight each day. Reflecting on our experiments allows us to improve our processes.
• All in all, the book contains 87 suggested tactics to help you put this four-step approach into practice. You’re not expected to do all of them, but you can experiment to find what works for you.

Detailed Summary of Make Time

What is Make Time about?

Make Time is not about getting more done, but about making time for things that matter. Most of us let other people or even algorithms decide how our precious time and attention is spent. (The authors know this all too well—they were product designers who worked on services like Gmail and YouTube.) The point of Make Time is to change our defaults so that we spend our time more intentionally, without relying on willpower.

If I started the morning with two hundred emails and got to zero by midnight, was that really a successful day?—Jake Knapp in Make Time

Knapp and Zeratsky (or “Jake and JZ”) explain their four-step approach (Highlight, Laser, Energise and Reflect), which you are meant to repeat every day. JZ apparently invented the 5-day design sprint at Google, and the authors subsequently ran over 100 design sprints with a bunch of start-ups in Google Ventures.

Both Jake and JZ started using the tactics in the book to become more productive at work. However, both of them eventually decided they’d rather make time for other priorities: Jake became a full-time writer while JZ chose to sail and travel full-time. While they’re not advocating that you quit your job to sail the world, it’s worth noting that once you make time for the “someday” projects you’ve been putting off, they may reveal a new and unexpected path.

The book lists 87 practical tactics that you can test out, each aimed at helping you achieve one of the four steps. You’re not expected to try all of them—not even the authors do all of them consistently—and certainly not all at once. But you can pick, test, and repeat. Over time, you’ll figure out which tactics work best for you. In this summary, I outline a few which resonated with me.

1. Highlight

Choose your highlight

Choose a single highlight to prioritise each day. What do you want to make time for? If someone asked you at the end of the day what your highlight was, what do you want the answer to be?

There are three ways you might pick your highlight:

• Urgency. What’s the most urgent thing you have to do today?
• Satisfaction. What highlight would bring me the most satisfaction at the end of the day? These are activities that aren’t so urgent, but are things you’ve been meaning to get around to for a while.
• Joy. What would bring me the most joy when reflecting back on the day? A joyful highlight may look like a “waste of time” to some people, but you only waste time if you’re not intentional about how you spend it.

The authors suggest picking a highlight that takes around 60-90 minutes. Don’t worry too much about what you choose—you can change your highlight partway through the day if things change. You can also repeat highlights for several days to make faster progress. You can’t really screw this up, and choosing a highlight will feel more natural over time.

Prioritise your highlight