Making time for your most important goals

Life is so busy we never look back and wonder what we are even getting done. The days fly by, but when you look back over a week/month/year, it is hard to put your finger on what exactly you spent your time on. Worse, most of us fail to make progress on our most important goals or spend time with the most important people and activities in our lives.

Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky is about slowing down and making time for the things that matter. It is not about doing more in your time – but to actually create more time in your day.

In the 21^st century two forces and constantly vying for our attention:

• Busy Bandwagon: our culture of constant busyness, the push of modern life to fill in every minute of our time.
• Infinity Pools: apps and other sources of endlessly replenishing content. If you can pull to refresh, it’s an Infinity Pool.

Between them, most of our time is spent on defaults that we don’t get to change, and instead of being mindful and changing them, we go along with them.

Willpower is not the way out, and neither is productivity. Being productive doesn’t mean doing the most important work; it just means reacting to other people’s priorities faster. Instead, you have to wrest control and create your own defaults so that you start making time for activities and people that matter to you.

Make Time is just four steps repeated every day: Highlight > Laser > Energise > Reflect.

• Highlight: Start each day by choosing the focal point you will prioritise and protect in your calendar over other people’s priorities.
• Laser: Beat distractions to make time for your highlights and adjust technology to achieve them.
• Energise: Use the body to recharge the brain
• Reflect: Adjust and improve your system by taking notes before the end of every day.

The book contains dozens of tactics, but we don’t need to use them all at once; we can pick, test and repeat. The authors suggest we start with one tactic from each area on the first day. Instead of aiming for perfection, start each day with a fresh slate and fit the tactics into your day rather than the other way around.

Highlight

Begin each day by thinking about what you want the highlight of your day to be. It is not the only thing you will do each day, but by choosing a highlight, you will be proactive about how you spend your time instead of letting technology, office defaults, and other people set your agenda. How you feel about a day does not depend on what happened to you but on what you choose to pay attention to.

There are three different criteria to choose your highlights for the day:

• Urgency: What is the most pressing thing I must do today?
• Satisfaction: At the end of the day, which highlight will give me the most satisfaction?
• Joy: What will give me the most joy when I reflect today?

Trust your gut to make the right choice. A good rule of thumb is to choose a highlight that takes 60-90 minutes. It is never to early or late in the day to change your highlight if circumstances so demand.

Here are a few tactics for choosing a highlight and making time for it in the day:

1. Write it down. The things you write down are more likely to happen. Make writing down your highlight a simple daily ritual, ideally the evening before or the first thing in the morning.
2. Groundhog it. If you didn’t get to your highlight or did not finish, you can always repeat it to build momentum. You can also have an ongoing highlight that is really important for you to finish (like writing a book por preparing for a marathon).
3. Stack rank your life. Make a list of the big things that matter in your life and rewrite them in order of priority. Highlight number one, and keep using this list to choose your highlights.
4. Batch the little stuff. Bundle up the smaller tasks and use batch processing to complete them in one highlight session. Knowing you can catch up with emails or calls later is both comforting and satisfying. And it stops you from being disrupted in the middle of other important things you are closing.
5. The might-do list. Instead of a to-do list, it is a list of things I might do. This removes the pressure of having to complete all of them and instead focus on the really important highlight.
6. The burner list. Divide a sheet of paper in half. The left side is your front burner with your most important project and its to-dos, while the right is your back burner with your second most important project (and its to-dos). Leave some counter space on the front burner to add more to-dos. Make a kitchen sink on the bottom half of the left side that holds the rest of your projects. Burn through the list every few days and re-create it over and over, allowing yourself to reprioritise each time.
7. Run a personal sprint. Choose a personal project and run it as a highlight over several days, which allows your brain to be more engaged and stuff to stay in your personal memory.

Here are some tactics for making time for your highlight.

8. Schedule your highlight. If you want to make time for your highlight, start with your calendar. Putting something on your calendar is like making a commitment to yourself. It forces you to confront trade-offs in how you spend your time. You only have so many hours a day, and once you schedule something, you cannot use that time for anything else.
9. Block your calendar. Use daily “do not schedule” blocks to make room for your highlights. Don’t be greedy and block up all of your calendars – leave space for interactions with colleagues and others. And treat these blocks with seriousness – don’t let other people book over it.
10. Bulldoze your calendar. Take control of your calendar. Push out meetings or change them into smaller meetings if you have to. Learn to say no.
11. Flake it till you make it. On days when you are overscheduled and struggling to make time for your highlight, it is ok to bail on some of your less important plans and meetings. It is not a long-term plan; over time, you will learn not to overcommit. But it is ok to bail once in a while as long as you are honest and courteous with the other person.
12. Just say no. The best way to get out of low-priority commitments is never to accept them in the first place. Saying yes is easier, but you will be much happier if you default to saying no to new projects, meetings or commitments. In the process, you will save yourself countless hours. Create scripts on how to say no, focusing on being friendly but honest. You can say yes to it in the future or turn it down permanently. If possible, connect them to other people or resources who could help.
13. Design your day. Block out your calendar for the entire day, and in the evenings, look back and see what worked and what you really spent time on. This way, you don’t have to decide what to do next constantly; instead, you have the freedom to focus on the moment.
14. Become a morning person. Early hours in the morning can seem like a gift if you can create a routine to get up early. Expose yourself to sunlight, get caffeine, and have a clear reason for waking up. You will also need to adjust your evening routine and design the night before to get 7-8 hours of sleep. Pay attention to what you eat and drink, and adjust your environment to signal bedtime to your body. You can lower the lights around your home, reduce exposure to blue light and screens and get to bed on time.
15. Make nighttime your highlight time. The biggest challenge is still having the energy to get anything done. You need to recharge first by taking a real break. Watch part of a movie, read a few pages from a novel, or go for a walk—anything that takes your mind out of the busy mode and recharges your mental battery. Then, when it is time to work on your highlight, put on a timer and switch off all distractions.
16. Quit when you are done. Working till exhaustion makes us more likely to fall behind by robbing us of the rest we need to prioritise and do our best work. Find the perfect time to stop. Or use your highlight; either you would have accomplished it, or you could do with the rest to attack it with renewed vigour or be satisfied that you did something equally important in that time.

Laser

When you are in laser mode, your attention is focused on the present, like a laser beam shining on a target. You are in flow, fully engaged and immersed in the moment. Distraction is the enemy of the laser mode – the disco ball in the path of your laser beam.

In today’s world, distraction has become the default, and willpower is not enough to protect your focus. Infinity pools are hard to resist; they pull on our genuine passion for technology and improve dramatically from year to year, egged on by competition between tech giants. They are engineered to play on the weakness of our caveman brains that has been programmed in our DNA.

Don’t wait for technology to give back your time. Tech companies make money when you use their products. Instead, create barriers to distraction. Bring back the barriers that product designers have insidiously removed to make these products as easily accessible as possible. When distraction is hard to access, you don’t have to worry about willpower.

Every distraction imposes a cost on the depth of your focus. When your brain changes contexts—say, going from painting a picture to answering a text and then back to painting again—there’s a switching cost. This “boot up” costs at least a few minutes, and for complex tasks, it can take even longer. Deep work, like interest, compounds. The longer you remain focused on your Highlight, the more engaging you’ll find it and the better work (or play) you’ll do. Here are some laser tactics to wrest back control.

Be the boss of your phone.

17. Try a distraction-free phone. In a nutshell, here is how you set up a distraction-free phone:
    • Delete social apps
    • Delete other infinity pools. Anything with an infinite supply of interesting content should be deleted. This includes games, news apps and streaming videos like YouTube.
    • Delete your email and remove your account (since email is deeply integrated into your phone).
    • Remove the web browser.
    • Keep everything else. Bottom line: if an app is a tool or if it doesn’t make you twitchy, keep it.

18. Log Out. Most social media and infinity pool apps encourage you to stay logged in, but you can change the default. When you’re done with email, Twitter, Facebook, or whatever, log out.
19. Remove notifications. They are non-stop attention thieves.
20. Clear your home screen. Move all the icons to the next screen. Leave nothing behind on that front screen except a nice, clean view of your background image. Make it less frictionless to access your favourite apps.
21. Wear a wristwatch. It replaces the need to check your phone when you want to check the time.
22. Leave devices behind. Instead of keeping your phone by your side, at the office or when you get home, put it in a drawer or a shelf.

Stay out of infinity pools.

23. Skip the morning check-in. When you wake up, your brain is rested, and you have no reason to feel distracted yet. As soon as you fire up that screen, you start a tug of war with your attention. Put it off. The longer you postpone the morning check-in, the longer you preserve the feeling of rest and calm, and the easier it is to get into laser mode.
24. Block distraction kryptonite. Most of us have an especially powerful infinity pool that we cannot resist. Find a way to block it. Or give it up for good.
25. Ignore the news. You don’t need to follow the daily news. The true breaking news will find you and the rest isn’t urgent or doesn’t matter. Most headlines will be obsolete by tomorrow, and they are designed to provoke anxiety. Instead, try to catch up with news weekly, ideally through a weekly magazine that covers the news.
26. Put your toys away. Reacting to what is in front of you is always easier than doing what you intend. Sign out of social media, close extra tabs, and close your email and chats at the end of the day so that you start the next day with a fresh slate. This two-minute investment at the end of the day will pay dividends the next day.
27. Fly without wi-fi. This will make your time in an aeroplane one of enforced focus.
28. Put a timer on the internet. It is hard to stay in laser mode when you know that the millions of possibilities of the internet are just a click away. But the internet doesn’t have to be on all the time. The easiest way to do this is to switch off the wi-fi on your laptop and put your phone in aeroplane mode. But this is also very simple to undo. A better way is to lock yourself out. There are many tools you can use – refer to com to see options.
29. Cancel the home internet. It is not as extreme as it sounds, as you can still use the internet by using your phone as a hotspot.
30. Watch out for time craters. Figure out the things that smash large chunks of time out of your day; it could be an app, a heavy meal, a late night of watching TV, etc. You can’t always avoid them, but you can dodge as many as possible.
31. Trade fake wins for real wins. When it is time for laser mode, remind yourself that your highlight is the real win.
32. Turn distractions into tools. Focus on the purpose of using an app. Instead of reacting to triggers, prompts and interruptions, use apps proactively and mindfully.
    • Start by identifying why you use a certain app and how that adds value to your life.
    • Next, think about how much time – per day, per week, per month – you want to spend on that activity. And consider if the app is the best way to accomplish this. For example, instead of using Instagram to stay in touch with family, call them instead.
    • Finally, consider when and how you would like to use the app to achieve your goal. You might realise that you only need to read the news once a week and save emails for the end of the day.

33. Become a fair-weather fan. Sports fandom doesn’t just take time; it takes emotional energy – whether your team is winning or losing. Don’t give it up; just become a fair-weather fan. Watch games only on special occasions, like when your team is in the finals. Stop reading the news when they are losing. You can still love your team and spend your time on something else.

Slow your inbox.

While an empty email is based on good logic, it only holds when you get a few emails per day. But for most of the day, email has become a substitute for work. Research suggests that if we read emails less often, we would be less stressed and more on top of things.

34. Deal with emails at the end of the day. That way, you can use your prime hours for your highlights and other important work. Given lesser energy at the end of the day, you will also be less likely to say yes to every request or bang out long responses when a simple reply would do.
35. Schedule email time. Add it to your calendar. Knowing that you have time scheduled for it later, will help you avoid wasting time on it now. And when email time is done, its done. Do as much as you can in the allotted time when move on.
36. Empty your inbox once a week. For anything urgent, ask your friends, family, and colleagues to text you. For anything non-urgent, they will learn to wait for a response.
37. Pretend messages are letters. Most letters sit on your desk for a while before you decide to do anything with them.
38. Be slow to respond. Taking control of your inbox requires a mental shift away from “as fast as possible” to “as slow as you can get away with.” This may sound like a jerk move, but it’s not. Anyone can contact you online, not just the highly relevant people in your vicinity. They have questions about their priorities, not yours. When it is convenient for them, not you. Let messages pile up, and respond to them in batches. It is worth prioritising over random distractions.
39. Reset expectations. When you limit email time or increase your response time, you need to manage the expectations of your colleagues and others. You can send them a templatised response, asking them to text if it is urgent. You may not even need an explicit message; your behaviour can speak for itself. In any job, any reputational damage you might suffer from being sloe (probably less than you think) will be more than compensated for by the increase in time for your most meaningful work.
40. Set up send email only.
41. Vacation off the grid. Even if you are not at an exotic location, you can choose to go off-grid. It is hard but possible. Laser mode matters on vacation as vacation time is precious and limited.
42. If you find it difficult to will yourself to take these steps, lock yourself out of your inbox. Freedom is a good app for this.

Make TV a sometimes treat.

43. Don’t watch the news. Instead, make it a habit to read the news once per day or even once per week.
44. Put your TV in the corner. Instead of positioning your TV front and centre in your living room, rearrange the furniture so that looking at the television is a bit awkward and inconvenient. Move your TV away from being the centre of your life. Literally.
45. Ditch your TV for a projector. The hassle of setting up a projector switches the default to off. And when you do watch, the experience is giant and awesome.
46. Go a la carte instead of all-you-can-eat. The trouble with subscriptions is that there is always something on. Try cancelling cable, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hotstar, and the like, and instead rent or buy movies and episodes one at a time. The idea is to change the default from “Let’s see what’s on” to “Do I really want to watch something?”
47. If you love something, set it free. Try to give up TV for a month.

Find flow.

48. Shut the door. Headphones and closed doors signal to everyone else that you shouldn’t be interrupted, and they send a signal to you, too. You are telling yourself it is time for laser mode.
49. Invent a deadline. Nothing’s better for focus than a deadline.
50. Explode your highlight. When unsure where to start, break your highlight into smaller, easier-to-manage bits. Ensure each item includes a specific verb, is small and relatively easy.
51. Play a laser soundtrack. cue is any trigger that causes you to act consciously or unconsciously. It’s the first step in the “habit loop” that Charles Duhigg describes in The Power of Habit: First, a cue prompts your brain to start the loop. The cue triggers you to perform a routine behaviour without thinking on autopilot. Finally, you get a reward: some result that makes your brain feel good and encourages it to rerun the same routine the next time you encounter the cue. We suggest using music as your cue for Laser mode. Try playing the same song or album every time you start your highlight or choose a specific song or album for each type of highlight. To find your soundtrack, think of a song you really like but don’t listen to all that often. Once you choose your soundtrack, listen to it only when you want to enter Laser mode.
52. Set a visible timer. If you use a time timer when you are getting into laser mode, you will feel an instant sense of energy and focus.
53. Avoid the lure of fancy tools. Researching and messing with fancy tools feels like work, but it isn’t. It is easier to get into laser mode when you adopt simple tools that are easily available.
54. Start on paper. Paper improves focus because you can’t waste time picking the perfect font or searching the web instead of working on your highlight. It is also one of the most flexible tools.

Stay in the zone.

Focus is hard work, and distractions will tempt you. Here are some techniques for letting go of that temptation and focusing on what really matters.

55. Make a “random questions” list. It is natural to feel twitchy for your phone and browser. Instead of reacting to every twitch, write your questions on a piece of paper, secure in the knowledge that you have saved your questions for future research.
56. Notice on breath. One breath can really be enough to reset your attention. Paying attention to your body shuts up the noise inside your brain.
    1. Breathe in through your nose. Notice air filling up your chest.
    2. Breathe out through your nose. Notice your body softening.
57. Be bored. Boredom allows your mind to wander, and wandering often leads to interesting places.
58. 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.
59. Take a day off. If you have tried everything else, you might need a rest day. Energy—especially creative energy—can fluctuate, and sometimes you need time to replenish it. Try taking real breaks throughout the day and switch to a joyful Highlight that will help you recharge.
60. Go all in. Wholeheartedness—complete commitment without holding anything back—could be the antidote to exhaustion.

Energize

If you can increase your energy every day, you’ll turn moments that might otherwise be lost to mental and physical fatigue into usable time for your highlights.

You are more than a brain.

The core of Make Time is choosing a highlight and getting into laser mode. But the secret sauce is Energize. Our thesis is simple: If you have energy, it’s easier to maintain your focus and priorities and avoid reacting to distractions and demands. To get the energy you need to maintain a focused, high-performing brain, you’ve got to take care of your body. When you don’t take care of your body, your brain can’t do its job.

Homo sapiens evolved to be hunter-gatherers, not screen tappers and pencil pushers. It was normal to eat various foods and walk all day to get a proper meal. And still, there was enough time for leisure and family. Humans are still wired that way, but we live a completely different way.

To build energy, we need to act like a caveman:

• Keep moving. You don’t have to walk all day – just a 20-30 mins session can make your brain work better, reduce stress, improve your mood and make it easier to sleep as well.
• Eat real food. Especially hard when you are surrounded by invented and manufactured food that the cavemen did not have access to.
• Optimise caffeine.
• Go off the grid. Today’s constant noise and distraction are a disaster for your energy and attention span.
• Make it personal. Interact with friends face to face.
• Sleep in a cave. Remove barriers that stand in your way of getting good sleep – from screens to caffeine.

Keep Moving

61. Exercise every day (but don’t be a hero). Exercise for about 20 minutes every day and give yourself partial credit. Moving to a just enough approach often means getting rid of the ego. Consistency is much more important than quantity.
62. Pound the pavement. We were born to walk, and it is really, really good for us. Walking helps you lose weight, avoid heart disease, reduce the risk of cancer, lower blood pressure, strengthen bones, and improve your mood by releasing painkilling endorphins. Walking is practically a wonder drug. And it gives us time to think, daydream or meditate. If you change the default from “ride when possible” to “walk when possible,” you will see opportunities everywhere.
63. Inconvenience yourself. Do things like cooking dinner, taking the stairs, using a suitcase without wheels or parking furthest in the car park. Make opportunities for movement everywhere.
64. Squeeze in a super short workout. Options include the 7-minute workout, 3×3 workout and a quick HIIT workout.

Eat real food.

65. Eat like a hunter-gatherer. Not too much, and mostly plants.
66. Central park your plate. Put salad on your plate first, then add everything around it.
67. Stay hungry. Fasting (to a point) makes your mind clear and your brain sharp, which is great for staying focused on your priorities.
68. Snack like a toddler. Choose high-quality snacks and only snack when your body and brain need it, not just for something to do
69. Follow the dark chocolate plan. You can have dessert as long as it is dark chocolate.

Optimise caffeine.

Caffeine is powerful, and because it directly affects your energy level, you should drink it with intent rather than on autopilot. Caffeine doesn’t technically give you an energy boost; instead, it blocks you from having an energy dip caused by adenosine-induced sleepiness. But once the caffeine wears off, all that adenosine is still hanging around, ready to pounce. If you don’t re-caffeinate, you crash. Here is a quick formula that works:

• Wake up without coffee
• Have the first cup between 9.30-10.30 a.m.
• Have the last cup between 1:30 and 2:30 p.m.

70. Wake up before you caffeinate. In the morning, your body naturally produces cortisol to wake you up. When cortisol is high, caffeine doesn’t do much for you. For most folks, cortisol is highest between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m., so for ideal morning energy, experiment with having that first cup of coffee at 9:30 a.m.
71. Caffeinate before you crash. If you wait until you get tired, it’s too late. Instead, think about when your energy regularly dips—for most of us, it’s after lunch—and have coffee (or your caffeinated beverage of choice) thirty minutes beforehand.
72. Take a caffeine nap. One slightly complicated but high-yield way to take advantage of caffeine mechanics is to wait till you get tired, drink some caffeine, then immediately take a fifteen-minute nap. During your light sleep, the brain clears out the adenosine. When you wake up, the receptors are clear and the caffeine has just shown up.
73. Maintain altitude with green tea. To keep a steady energy level throughout the day, try replacing high doses of caffeine (such as a giant cup of brewed coffee) with more frequent low doses. Green tea is a great option. You also can try the Italian solution: the classic espresso. If you like espresso—which I do—and have access to it—which I occasionally do—it’s another great low-dose option. A single espresso is roughly comparable to half a cup of coffee or two cups of green tea.
74. Turbo your highlight. Try to time your caffeine intake so that you’re wired right when you start your Highlight. Make a cup of coffee just before you sit down to do deep work.
75. Learn your last call. Caffeine has a half-life of 5-6 hours. So, at least some caffeine may block at least some adenosine receptors for many hours after you have it, possibly messing with your sleep and energy the next day. If you have trouble sleeping, your last call may be earlier than you think.
76. Disconnect sugar. Many caffeinated drinks are also very sugary. But although sugar provides an immediate rush, you don’t need us to tell you that it isn’t good for sustained energy. We do suggest you consider separating the caffeine from the sweets.

Go off the grid.

77. Get woodsy. Forests recharge the battery in your brain. Just experiment with spending a few minutes in a park and note what it does for your mental energy. If you can’t get to the park, step outside for a breath of fresh air. Even if you crack a window, we predict you’ll feel better. Our hunter-gatherer bodies feel more alive outdoors.
78. Trick yourself into meditating. Meditation is just a breather for your brain. When you meditate, instead of passively going along with the thoughts, you stay quiet and notice the thoughts, and that slows them down and gives your brain a break. Meditation is also exercise for your brain. Staying quiet and noticing your thoughts is refreshing, but ironically, it’s also hard work. So here is some meditation advice.
    • To get started, use a guided app (like Headspace).
    • Aim low. Even a three-minute session can increase your energy. Ten minutes is awesome.
    • You don’t have to sit in the lotus position. Try guided meditation while riding the bus, lying down, walking, running, or even eating.
    • If the word meditation feels uncomfortable to you, call it something else. Try “quiet time,” “resting,” “pausing,” “taking a break,” or “doing a Headspace” (or whatever app you use).
    • Some people say meditation counts only if you do it unassisted for long periods. Those people are jerks. If it works for you and you’re happy, you can keep doing short guided meditation sessions forever.

79. Leave your headphones at home. Your music, podcast, or audiobook prevents boredom, but boredom creates space for thinking and focus. Take a break and leave your headphones at home. Just listen to the sounds of traffic, or the clack of your keyboard, or your footsteps on the pavement. Resist the itch to fill the blank space.
80. Take real brakes. Try to take breaks without screens: Gaze out the window (it’s good for your eyes), go for a walk (it’s good for your mind and body), grab a snack (it’s good for your energy if you’re hungry), or talk to someone (it’s usually good for your mood unless you talk to a jerk).

Make it personal.

81. Spend time with your tribe. People with strong relationships are more likely to live long, healthy, fulfilling lives. When we say “spending time,” we mean having real conversations with your voice, not just commenting on posts, clicking hearts and thumbs-ups, or sending emails, texts, photos, emojis, and animated GIFs. Spending time with interesting, high-energy people is one of the best—and most enjoyable—ways to recharge your battery.
82. Eat without screens.

Sleep in a cave.

83. Make your bedroom a Bed Room. Looking at social media or news hinders the hours-long process of gradually removing mental stimuli and drifting into sleep. If you want to improve your sleep, keep the phone out of your bedroom—at all times. And don’t stop there. Remove all electronic devices to transform your bedroom into a true sanctuary for sleep. No TVs, no iPads. No Kindles with backlights. Reading in bed is a wonderful alternative, but paper books or magazines are best. A Kindle is okay, too, because it’s not loaded with apps and other distractions; make sure to turn off the bright white backlight. Put your alarm clock on a dresser or shelf across the room if possible. This will keep the light away from your eyes and help you wake up. When the alarm sounds, you’ll have no choice but to get out of bed, stretch your legs, and switch it off.
84. Fake the sunset (and sunrise too by using automatic “dawn simulator” lights). Here’s how to do it:
    • Starting when you eat dinner or a few hours before your ideal bedtime, turn down the lights in your home. Switch off bright overhead lights. Instead, use dim table/side lamps. For bonus points, light candles at the dinner table.
    • Turn on your phone, computer, or TV’s “night mode.”
    • When you go to bed, kick all devices out of the room.
    • If sunlight or streetlight is still sneaking into your bedroom, try a simple sleep mask over your eyes.

85. Sneak a nap. Lots of studies show that napping improves alertness and cognitive performance in the afternoon. You don’t even have to fall asleep. Just lying down and resting for ten to twenty minutes can be a great way to recharge. If you can’t sleep on the job, consider napping at home. Even if you only nap on the weekend, you’ll benefit.
86. Don’t jet lag yourself. When we fall behind our schedule, it is tempting to sleep in late and catch up. The problem is it doesn’t work. Sleeping late is like giving yourself a jetlag. It confuses your internal clock and makes it even harder to bounce back from the original deficit.
87. Put on your own oxygen mask first. You cannot take care of others without taking care of yourself first.

Reflect

This is the final step of Make Time. Here, you will use some science to tailor this system uniquely to yourself. The scientific method underlying even the most complicated of scientific fields is quite straightforward:

• Observe that is going on.
• Guess why things are happening the way they are.
• Experiment to test your hypothesis.
• Measure the results and decide whether you are right.

The tactics in this book are 87 experiments to test the hypotheses of highlight, laser and energise. Collecting the data is super easy. Take a few moments to answer a few simple questions in an elementary format:

As you experiment with the system it is important to remember that some tactics might work right away while others may need some time and patience.

Including gratitude ends up biasing your experiments but in a good way. It is hard to change habits so it is helpful to look back on the day with a grateful lens.

We also recommend setting a recurring reminder on your phone to reinforce your new Make Time habits.

Conclusion

I have written about productivity and focus earlier as well. Deep Work and Stolen Focus are old favourites that I have reviewed blogs.

What makes Make Time different is that it cuts right to the chase and set out a huge list of tactics that you can start using right away. With some experimentation, everyone should be able to take away a few tactics they can employ in their daily life right away. That is invaluable.