Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day

This book provides great tactics that will help you focus on what matters to you in this busy world, where keeping infinity pools away could be a challenge..The concept of the highlight was something new to me but I found it really helpful when I applied it.I would definitely recommend this book to those who find it difficult to focus and feel the urge to check their phones every now and then.Thanks a lot for making the time to write this book!

I started this book almost six months ago, and really enjoyed the beginning. It provides some helpful productivity advice in a light and breezy writing style. There's nothing really groundbreaking here, but I still found it helpful: the key ideas are to choose one Highlight for each day, use various techniques to increase your focus (often by reducing distractions) and increase your energy, and refine your process continuously by reflecting on what works and what doesn't. Many of the techniques are tiny and straightforward but still impactful, like signing out of social media accounts so that you need to put in just a little bit more effort and thought before getting caught up in a distraction.What I didn't like was the energy section's emphasis on evolutionary psychology and living like a caveman (the caveman was called Urk, which I found irritatingly cutesy). The basic idea is that there's a "huge disconnect between our hunter-gatherer roots and our crazy modern world", and we should try to live more like a caveman because our bodies evolved for that lifestyle. This perspective requires some extreme simplifications that often seemed pretty dubious. Here's one passage:"Urk was a hunter-gatherer. He didn't eat unless he collected, caught, or killed his food. Can you imagine going out to gather berries or hunt for buffalo every morning, noon, and evening, plus any time in between when your blood sugar started to feel low?"The point is that just because we can eat all the time, that doesn't mean we should."I'm not convinced at all that someone who gathered berries in the morning couldn't keep any berries to eat throughout the day, or even the next day. And I'm really not convinced that any random thought the authors happen to conceive about caveman life is automatically correct and should be used as a guide for healthy living.Beyond the potential of being incorrect and unfounded, I think that evolutionary psychology can also be actively harmful. The authors are both former Googlers, which brings to mind that other infamous Google guy with a penchant for evolutionary psychology: James Damore, who wrote a memo about the biological differences between men and women to explain why he opposed programs intended to increase representation of women in tech. Damore argues that "differences [between men and women] aren't just socially constructed because... [t]hey're exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective".So, I wish Knapp and Zeratsky had focused on empirical studies about how to increase energy and focus, rather than relying on speculative theorizing about the past and its influence on the present. That weakened an otherwise good book and made me much less likely to recommend it to others. The book does contain plenty of valuable ideas, and the writing is often humorous and entertaining, but much of it has to be taken with a big grain of salt.

Good ideas. But I found that after the first quarter of the book, I had to skim through: it’s a good collection of self-explanatory bullet points. A whole entire book seems an overkill.

TL;DR: Make Time has helped both my wife and I take much greater control over our days, helping us focus more on what fulfills and less on just marking days off of a calendar.There's a real line between being a productive person, and being a productivity person. Someone who focuses on so many "hacks" or ways to get more out of every second, that efficiency in and of itself becomes to goal to the expense of everything else. That may be useful in a manufacturing job, but in our daily lives, there is surely more.This is where Make Time really shines. Far from being a mad dash to some invisible finish line, Make Time provides simple, easy to read tools that can be used to refocus on what truly makes you happy. The book is written as a bit of a toolbox, meant to allow you to take pieces that work for you, and leave the ones that don't. Using that approach has massively improved my lifestyle.As an example, after reading a few chapters in Make Time, I started having a morning ritual with my wife of making a hot cup of herbal tea, nuts, and cheese. Meanwhile, we would rearrange our chairs in our front room to face the sun and talk about what our highlights would be for the day as we watched the sunrise over the mountains, wrapped up in warm blankets. After that, I would perform a quick 7-minute exercise, ready to hit the day with a plan and energy to do it. I would frequently take a mental break in the middle of the workday, even giving myself opportunities to nap in my building's cell phone booths (with a visible 15-minute timer for passersby) to recharge my batteries and finish the workday hard. Then, on the ride home, I would meditate, newly recharging my brain and allowing myself to move on from work and to be truly present at home. Probably most importantly, I turned off almost all notifications on my phone. I noticed that when I was home, I was way more proactive spending time with my wife, getting things done around the house, and engaging in meaningful and fulfilling hobbies.My story isn't all that unique, but it has all amounted to huge changes in my quality of life. All of the things I mentioned above are simple changes that were integrated over time, I'm positive that if you pick up this book and try out its experiments, you too will find something in there that will help you become more present, more fulfilled, and more able to enjoy everyday life.

The authors make use of some simple and ordinary that can be applied in daily routines to optimize time and focus on what really matter

Ottimo per contenuti e strategie pratiche da applicare ogni giorno. Molto interessante lo stile con cui è scritto. Puoi aprire il libro in qualsiasi punto e trovarti già pronte le tattiche da applicare per guadagnare quel tempo di qualità che porta ricchezza nella tua vita.

I needed something to help me fit more in, and I'm not really in a creative /engineering field, so focusing on one "highlight" a day isn't really for me. I don't really have that luxury, I have to do many equally important tasks a day that require concentration and focus.A lot of my day is routine stuff that just needs to get done consistently to maintain order/progress/health in my life, but I hate doing it.I guess it all comes down to prioritisation, and the fact that we have limited hours in a day.Though they do have useful tips, like work rythms (if you are more productive in certain hours of the day) ... but these tips are common to many time-management books.

Livre dans le style caractéristique de Jake Knapp, bien écrit, bien documenté, sympa & fun.Très concret tout en amenant une vraie reflexion.Ca ne révolutionne pas mon quotidien étant déjà initié aux pratiques, mais ouvre quelques horizons sympas !

A short Simple book poached full of ideas to regain your time and sanity. Opposing points of view really highlight that there are many ways to make time. A good read.