Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day

by Jake Knapp

When we tear ourselves away from the Busy Bandwagon, the Infinity Pools are ready to lure us in. While the Busy Bandwagon defaults to endless tasks, the Infinity Pools default to endless distraction. Our phones, laptops, and televisions are filled with games, social feeds, and videos. Everything is at our fingertips, irresistible, even addictive. Every bump of friction is smoothed away. Refresh Facebook. Browse YouTube. Keep up on the nonstop breaking news, play Candy Crush, binge-watch HBO. These are the defaults behind the ravenous Infinity Pools, devouring every scrap of time the Busy Bandwagon leaves behind. With the average person spending four-plus hours a day on their smartphone and another four-plus hours watching TV shows, distraction is quite literally a full-time job.

The Backstory, Part 1: The Distraction-Free iPhone Jake It was 2012, and my two sons were playing with a wooden train in our living room. Luke (age: eight) was diligently assembling the track while Flynn (age: baby) drooled on a locomotive. Then Luke picked his head up and said: His question wasn’t intended to make me feel bad; he was just curious. But I didn’t have a good answer. I mean, sure, there was probably some excuse for checking my email right at that moment. But not a great one. All day, I’d been looking forward to spending time with my kids, and now that it was finally happening, I wasn’t really there at all. At that moment, something clicked. It wasn’t just that I had succumbed to one moment of distraction—I had a bigger problem. Every day, I realized, I was reacting: to my calendar, to incoming email, to the infinite stream of new stuff on the Internet. Moments with my family were slipping past me, and for what? So I could answer one more message or check off another to-do? The realization was frustrating because I was already trying to find balance. When Luke was born in 2003, I’d set out on a mission to become more productive at work so that I could spend more quality time at home. By 2012, I considered myself a master of productivity and efficiency. I kept reasonable hours and was home in time for dinner every night. This was what work/life balance looked like, or so I believed. But if that was the case, why was my eight-year-old son calling me out for bein...

Four Lessons from the Design Sprint Laboratory The first thing we learned was that something magic happens when you start the day with one high-priority goal. Each sprint day, we drew attention to one big focal point: On Monday, the team creates a map of the problem; on Tuesday, each person sketches one solution; on Wednesday, they decide which solutions are best; on Thursday, they build a prototype; and on Friday, they test it. Each day’s goal is ambitious, but it’s just one thing. This focal point creates clarity and motivation. When you have one ambitious but achievable goal, at the end of the day, you’re done. You can check it off, let go of work, and go home satisfied. Another lesson from our design sprints was that we got more done when we banned devices. Since we set the rules, we were able to prohibit laptops and smartphones, and the difference was phenomenal. Without the constant lure of email and other Infinity Pools, people brought their complete attention to the task at hand, and the default switched to focus. We also learned about the importance of energy for focused work and clear thinking. When we first started running design sprints, teams worked long hours, fueled by sugary treats. Late in the week, energy would plummet. So we made adjustments, and saw how things like a healthy lunch, a quick walk, frequent breaks, and a slightly shorter workday helped maintain peak energy, resulting in better and more effective work. Lastly, these experiments taught us th...

Jake I wanted to start writing in the evenings, but realized that the lure of watching TV was a big problem. So I experimented and made a serious change to my defaults, putting the DVD player in the closet and unsubscribing from Netflix. With the freed-up time, I started working on an adventure novel, and I stuck with it, pausing only when we wrote our book Sprint. Writing was something I’d wanted to do since I was a kid, and making time for it felt awesome.

Reclaiming your time and attention can be weirdly easy. As Jake learned from his distraction-free iPhone, the changes do not require tons of self-discipline. Instead, change comes from resetting defaults, creating barriers, and beginning to design the way you spend your time. Once you start using Make Time, these small positive shifts become self-reinforcing. The more you try it, the more you’ll learn about yourself and the more the system will improve. Make Time isn’t anti-technology; we’re both tech nerds, after all. We won’t ask you to disconnect entirely or become a hermit. You can still follow your friends on Instagram, read the news, and send emails like a modern person. But by challenging the standard behaviors in our efficiency-obsessed, distraction-saturated world, you can get the best of technology and put yourself back in control. And once you take control, you can change the game.

The first step is choosing a single highlight to prioritize in your day. Next, you’ll employ specific tactics to stay laser-focused on that highlight—we’ll offer a menu of tricks to beat distraction in an always-connected world. Throughout the day, you’ll build energy so you can stay in control of your time and attention. Finally, you’ll reflect on the day with a few simple notes.

Highlight: Start Each Day by Choosing a Focal Point The first step in Make Time is deciding what you want to make time for. Every day, you’ll choose a single activity to prioritize and protect in your calendar. It might be an important goal at work, like finishing a presentation. You might choose something at home, like cooking dinner or planting your garden. Your Highlight might be something you don’t necessarily have to do but want to do, like playing with your kids or reading a book. Your Highlight can contain multiple steps; for example, finishing that presentation might include writing the closing remarks, completing the slides, and doing a practice run-through. By setting “finish presentation” as your Highlight, you commit to complete all the tasks required. Of course, your Highlight isn’t the only thing you’ll do each day. But it will be your priority. Asking yourself “What’s going to be the highlight of my day?” ensures that you spend time on the things that matter to you and don’t lose the entire day reacting to other people’s priorities. When you choose a Highlight, you put yourself in a positive, proactive frame of mind.

The Make Time Tactics: Pick, Test, Repeat This book includes dozens of tactics for putting Make Time into practice. Some tactics will work for you, but some won’t (and some may just sound nuts). It’s like a cookbook. You wouldn’t try all the recipes at once, and you don’t need to do all the tactics at once, either. Instead, you’ll pick, test, and repeat. As you read, take note of any tactics you want to try. Fold the corner of the page or make a list on a piece of paper. Look for tactics that seem doable but a little challenging—and especially, look for tactics that sound like fun. On your first day using Make Time, we suggest trying one tactic from each step. That is, one new tactic to help you make time for your Highlight, one that keeps you laser-focused by changing how you react to distractions, and one for building energy—three tactics total.

None of us can be perfect eaters, perfectly productive, perfectly mindful, and perfectly rested all the time. We can’t do the fifty-seven things bloggers tell us we’re supposed to do before 5 a.m. And even if we could, we shouldn’t. Perfection is a distraction—another shiny object taking your attention away from your real priorities. We’d like you to forget the idea of perfection when it comes to Make Time. Don’t even try to do it perfectly—there’s no such thing! But there’s also no way to screw it up. And you won’t have to start over if you “fall off the wagon,” because each day is a clean slate.

instead of thinking of these tactics as “more things you have to do,” consider ways to make them part of your normal life. That’s why we suggest, for example, walking to work (this page) and exercising at home (this page) rather than an expensive gym membership or an hourlong fitness class every morning. The best tactics are the ones that fit into your day. They’re not something you force yourself to do; they’re just something you do. And in most cases, they’ll be things you want to do.

A couple of years earlier, while working at a fast-paced tech startup, I became obsessed with making the most of every hour. My work was neatly planned and organized; I processed and cleared my inbox every day; I even carried a stack of notecards in my pocket so I could capture any spontaneous thoughts or ideas. Not a single moment of thinking time was to be wasted! That worked well enough at the office, so I wondered: Could these kinds of productivity hacks help me make the most of my time at home, too? I began to see my life as a problem to be solved with categorized to-do lists, a rigid calendar, and an absurd filing system. It didn’t work. I was so focused on small tasks that the days slipped by even faster than before. The blur was getting worse. It sucked. I decided to overhaul my approach. Instead of obsessively managing my minutes, I turned my attention to the long term. I created lists of one-year, three-year, five-year, and ten-year goals, which I asked my girlfriend to review and discuss with me. (The next year she married me, so I guess she was on the same page with at least one of my goals.) Setting goals seemed more meaningful than optimizing my to-do list, but I still felt adrift—these objectives were too far away to be motivating. And there were other problems: What if my priorities changed? All of a sudden I’d realize I was working toward a goal that no longer mattered to me. And living a “someday” life was demoralizing. In the words of author James Clear,...

We believe that focusing on these in-between activities—in the space between goals and tasks—is the key to slowing down, bringing satisfaction to your daily life, and helping you make time. Long-term goals are useful for orienting you in the right direction but make it hard to enjoy the time spent working along the way. And tasks are necessary to get things done, but without a focal point, they fly by in a forgettable haze.

What Will Be the Highlight of Your Day? We want you to begin each day by thinking about what you hope will be the bright spot. If, at the end of the day, someone asks you, “What was the highlight of your day?” what do you want your answer to be? When you look back on your day, what activity or accomplishment or moment do you want to savor? That’s your Highlight. Your Highlight is not the only thing you’ll do each day. After all, most of us can’t ignore our inboxes or say no to our bosses. But choosing a Highlight gives you a chance to be proactive about how you spend your time instead of letting technology, office defaults, and other people set your agenda. And although the Busy Bandwagon says you should try to be as productive as possible each day, we know it’s better to focus on your priorities even if that means you don’t get to everything on your to-do list. Your Highlight gives each day a focal point. Research shows that the way you experience your days is not determined primarily by what happens to you. In fact, you create your own reality by choosing what you pay attention to.1 This might seem obvious, but we think it’s a big deal: You can design your time by choosing where you direct your attention. And your daily Highlight is the target of that attention. Focusing on a daily Highlight stops the tug-of-war between Infinity Pool distractions and the demands of the Busy Bandwagon. It reveals a third path: being intentional and focused about how you spend your time.

A good rule of thumb is to choose a Highlight that takes sixty to ninety minutes. If you spend less than sixty minutes, you might not have time to get in the zone, but after ninety minutes of focused attention, most people need a break. Sixty to ninety minutes is a sweet spot. It’s enough time to do something meaningful, and it’s a reasonable amount of time to create in your schedule.

Jake It’s never too late in the day to choose (or change) your Highlight. Recently, I had a really lousy day. In the morning, I’d planned to make my Highlight editing 100 pages of the Make Time manuscript. But all day long I was randomized by everything from a plumbing problem to a pounding headache to unexpected dinner guests. In the afternoon, I realized I could change my Highlight—and my attitude. I decided to scrap my editing goal for the day and instead focus on enjoying the dinner with friends. When I made that choice, my whole day turned around. I could let go and enjoy.

if we had to pick one method for writing down a Highlight, we’d choose sticky notes. They’re easy to get and easy to use, and they don’t require batteries or software updates.

Jake I’ll share a couple of my own lists. First, from August 2017: Family Write Make Time Write novel Advising and workshops One month later, in September, I reshuffled my list: Write Make Time Family Advising and workshops Write novel Yes, I demoted my family to number 2. What a jerk! But I knew I had to put the pedal to the metal on Make Time so that we could finish the manuscript before JZ left town to sail to Mexico in October. And my family was in a good spot—my kids were back in school after a summer in which we did a bunch of projects and traveled together, and we had good defaults in place for spending time together. Shifting family to number two didn’t mean ignoring them; it just meant being honest with myself about where I most needed to focus.

Here’s one thing we do agree on: We hate to-do lists. Checking off finished tasks feels good, but the fleeting glow of accomplishment masks an ugly truth: Most to-dos are just reactions to other people’s priorities, not yours. And no matter how many tasks you finish, you’re never done—more to-dos are always waiting to take their place. To-do lists just perpetuate the feeling of “unfinishedness” that dogs modern life. To-do lists also can obscure what’s really important. We’re all susceptible to choosing the path of least resistance, especially when we’re tired, stressed, overwhelmed, or just plain busy. To-do lists make it worse because they mix easy tasks with hard-but-important ones. When you use a to-do list, you’re tempting yourself to put off those important tasks and knock off one of the easy items instead. But to-do lists aren’t all bad. They let you capture things so you don’t have to hold them all in your brain. To-do lists let you see everything in one place. They’re a necessary evil. So as much as we dislike to-do lists, we have to use them. Over the years, we’ve both developed our own special to-do-list technique.

JZ My solution to the to-do-list problem is to separate the decision about what to do from the act of doing it. I call my approach the Might-Do List. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a list of things you might do. Projects sit on your Might-Do List until you decide to make them your Highlight and schedule them on your calendar. Here’s how the pieces fit together: You’re especially vulnerable to path-of-least-resistance thinking when you don’t plan. But when you take an important task off your Might-Do List, make it your daily Highlight, and put it on your calendar, you’ll know you made a thoughtful decision about how to spend your time, and you can pour your energy into the task at hand. A Might-Do List can help you avoid the to-do-list treadmill at the office or on personal projects.

8. Schedule Your Highlight If you want to make time for your Highlight, start with the calendar. Like writing down your Highlight (#1), this tactic could hardly be simpler: Think about how much time you want for your Highlight. Think about when you want to do your Highlight. Put your Highlight on the calendar. When you schedule something, you’re making a commitment to yourself, sending yourself a tiny message that says: “I’m going to do this.” But scheduling your Highlight has another important benefit: It forces you to confront the trade-offs in how you spend your time. Imagine today’s Highlight is to buy groceries and cook dinner for your family. You think, “Dinner should be ready at 7 p.m. or the kids won’t get to bed in time. And I need to start cooking at 6 p.m. That means I have to leave the office at 5 p.m. so I have time to stop at the store on my way home.” You add an event to your calendar at 5 p.m. and label it “Leave work.” Once you’ve scheduled your Highlight, that time is taken. You can’t schedule any meetings or commit to any other activity. When other things come up, you get to decide whether to schedule them in the remaining time around your Highlight or whether they can wait. You can see your priorities take form right there on your calendar.

9. Block Your Calendar If you start with an empty calendar, you can schedule your Highlight for the ideal time, when your energy is highest and your focus is at its peak. But for most of us, starting the day with a blank calendar is about as likely as finding a thousand-dollar bill on the sidewalk: It certainly could happen, but we’d better not count on it.4 And if you work in an office where colleagues can add meetings to your calendar, forget about it. You’ll have to take a different approach: Use daily “do not schedule” blocks to make room for your Highlight. JZ learned this trick from his friend Graham Jenkin. In 2007 and 2008, Graham was JZ’s boss at Google, and to JZ, it seemed like Graham could do it all. He managed something like twenty people, and he gave each of them personal attention and true support. He also led the redesign of AdWords, Google’s flagship advertising product. This meant he was involved in everything from designing user interfaces, to testing with customers and reviewing specifications, to coordinating with engineers. Everyone wondered where Graham found the time, and most people (including JZ) assumed he worked really long hours. But they were wrong. In many ways, Graham had the typical schedule of a corporate manager. Each day was packed with meetings. But there was something unusual about his calendar: From 6 to 11 a.m. each day, Graham had scheduled time with himself. “That’s my time. I wake up early, get to the office early, hit the gym, gr...

10. Bulldoze Your Calendar If you can’t block your calendar, there’s another way to clear time for your Highlight: Bulldoze it. Imagine a tiny bulldozer driving through your calendar, pushing events around. The bulldozer might compress one meeting by fifteen minutes and another by thirty. It might shove your one-on-one from the morning to the afternoon or push your lunch back by half an hour so you can get a full two hours of Highlight time. The bulldozer could even stack all your meetings on one or two days of the week, freeing up the other days for solo work. Bulldozing is admittedly easier if you’re the boss than it is if you’re the intern,5 but you might have more control over your calendar than you think. There’s no harm in telling people something important came up and asking if they can meet a little earlier or later or for a quick chat instead of for an hour. In fact, when meetings are shortened or disappear from the calendar, people are usually thrilled.

Being this scheduled might sound annoying: “Where’s the freedom and spontaneity, man?” But in reality, a structured day creates freedom. When you don’t have a plan, you have to decide constantly what to do next, and you might get distracted thinking about all the things you should or could do. But a completely planned day provides the freedom to focus on the moment. Instead of thinking about what to do next, you’re free to focus on how to do it. You can be in the flow, trusting the plan set out by your past self. When is the best time of day to check email? How long should it take? You can design the answers ahead of time rather than reacting in real time.

If you can’t make time for your Highlight in the middle of the day, you might try creating some space in the early morning or late evening. JZ’s a night owl who turned himself into a morning person. Jake couldn’t make the switch, so he optimized the night.

Start with Light, Coffee, and Something to Do Don’t underestimate the importance of light in waking up. Humans are hardwired to wake when it’s light and get sleepy when it’s dark. But if you want to make time for your Highlight before the workday, you can’t wait for sunrise; for most of the year in much of the world, you need to wake before dawn. So when I wake up, I turn on every light in my apartment (or boat when I’m living aboard). And I try to always watch the sunrise, even if it’s an hour or two after I get up; seeing the sky go from dark to light reminds my brain that it’s time to transition from night to day.

Giving yourself something to do in the morning will help you wake up early, but for me it’s also why I wake up early. Even on the days when I don’t work on my daily Highlight first thing in the morning, I still find reasons to make time in those predawn hours. Exercise is a great morning activity. Even doing dishes, ironing shirts, or straightening up around the house helps me wake up and feel productive before the day has started.

It’s not always easy for me to wake up at 5:30 a.m., but I’ve learned to love mornings. And the payoff is amazing; by 9:30 a.m. most days I’ve had an hour of productive work, showered and dressed, walked two miles, had breakfast, and enjoyed two cups of coffee.

Jake We’re genetically predisposed to be either morning people or night people. I base this not on science but on firsthand observation of my sons conducted over the past several thousand days. My older son, Luke, is a morning person who wakes up singing. At breakfast, he can speak at a rate of approximately 2,600 words per minute, and that’s without any coffee. My son Flynn, in contrast, is a night person. The morning makes him confused and angry, and if I try to talk to him before 7 a.m., he will punch me in the crotch.

These tactics are all based on the same philosophy: The best way to defeat distraction is to make it harder to react. By adding a few steps that get in the way of checking Facebook, catching up on the news, or turning on the TV, you can short-circuit the cycle that makes these products so sticky. After just a few days, you’ll have a new set of defaults: You’ll go from distracted to focused, from reactive to intentional, and from overwhelmed to in control. It’s all about creating a little inconvenience. When distraction is hard to access, you don’t have to worry about willpower. You can channel your energy into making time instead of wasting it.

When you immerse yourself in Laser mode rather than ping-ponging between distraction and attention, you not only make time for what matters most, you make higher-quality time. 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. Your brain has to load a different set of rules and information into working memory. This “boot up” costs at least a few minutes, and for complex tasks, it can take even longer. The two of us have found it can take a couple of hours of uninterrupted writing before we’re doing our best work; sometimes it even requires several consecutive days before we’re in the zone. It’s like compound interest. The longer you remain focused on your Highlight, the more engaging you’ll find it and the better work (or play) you’ll do.

17. Try a Distraction-Free Phone And yet it would be a relief in a way not to be bothered with it any more…Sometimes I have felt it was like an eye looking at me…I found I couldn’t rest without it in my pocket. —BILBO BAGGINS

Removing email and other Infinity Pool apps from our phones might be the simplest, most powerful change we’ve made to reclaim time and attention. We’ve both had distraction-free phones since 2012, and not only have we survived, we’ve thrived—becoming more effective in our work and just generally enjoying our days more.

Jake My phone used to call to me from my pocket the way the Ring called to Bilbo Baggins. The second I felt even the slightest twinge of boredom, my phone would appear in the palm of my hand as if by magic. Now, without Infinity Pool apps, I feel less twitchy. Those moments when I used to instinctively reach for my phone, I’m forced to pause—and it turns out those moments are not so boring after all.

1. Delete social apps. First, delete Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and so on (including whatever else has been invented since we wrote this). Don’t worry. If you change your mind later, it is very easy to install these apps again. 2. Delete other Infinity Pools. Anything with an infinite supply of interesting content should be deleted. This includes games, news apps, and streaming video like YouTube. If you might refresh it obsessively and/or lose hours without meaning to, get rid of it. 3. Delete email and remove your account. Email is both an alluring Infinity Pool and the beating heart of the Busy Bandwagon. And because it can be difficult to write proper replies to email on the phone (because of time limitations and the challenges of typing on a touch screen), it’s often anxiety-provoking as well. We check email on our phones to catch up, but the result is usually just a reminder that we’re falling behind. Remove email from your phone and you’ll remove a lot of stress along with it. Email accounts usually are deeply integrated into the device, so in addition to deleting any email apps, you may want to go into your phone’s settings and actually remove your email account. Your phone will issue a dire warning about this (“Are you sure you want to remove your email account?”), but don’t be deterred. Again, if you change your mind later, it’s simply a matter of reentering your log-in info. 4. Remove the Web browser. Finally, you need to disable the Swiss Army knif...

Bottom line: If an app is a tool or if it doesn’t make you twitchy, keep it.

Again, your distraction-free phone can be an experiment; you don’t need to commit to it for the rest of your life. Give it twenty-four hours, a week, or even a month. Of course, there will be times when you sincerely have to use your email or a browser, and when that happens, you can temporarily reenable the apps you need for the task at hand. The key thing here is that you’re using your phone intentionally—it’s not using you. And when you’re done, you set the default back to “off.”

20. Clear Your Homescreen Your phone is designed for speed. Scan your face or fingerprint and you’re in. And most people keep their favorite apps right on their homescreen for immediate access. Scan, tap, app! This friction-free process is great when you’re getting driving directions, but when you’re trying to get into Laser mode, it’s an autobahn to distraction. To slow things down, try making your homescreen blank. Move all the icons to the next screen over (and from the second screen to the third and so on). Don’t leave anything behind on that first screen except a nice clean view of your beautiful background image. A blank homescreen provides a tiny moment of quiet every time you use your phone. It’s an intentional inconvenience, a small pause—a speed bump keeping distraction one step away. If you unlocked your phone reflexively, a blank homescreen offers you a moment to ask yourself, “Do I really want to be distracted right now?”

23. Skip the Morning Check-In When you wake up in the morning, whether you slept for five hours or ten, you’ve had a nice long break from the Busy Bandwagon and the Infinity Pools. This is a golden moment. The day is fresh, your brain is rested, and you have no reason to feel distracted yet. No news items to stress about, no work emails to stew over. Savor it. Don’t reach for email, Twitter, Facebook, or the news right away. It’s very tempting to do a check-in first thing in the morning and get the latest updates; after all, something in the world always changes overnight. But as soon as you fire up that screen, you start a tug-of-war of attention between the present moment and everything out there on the Internet. Put it off. The longer you postpone the morning check-in—until 9 a.m., 10 a.m., or even after lunch—the longer you preserve that feeling of rested calm and the easier it is to get into Laser mode.

24. Block Distraction Kryptonite Most of us have one especially powerful Infinity Pool we just can’t resist. We call it “distraction Kryptonite.” Just as regular Kryptonite overwhelms Superman, distraction Kryptonite gets past our defenses and sabotages our plans. Your distraction Kryptonite might be something common and obvious such as Facebook, or if you’re an oddball like JZ, it might be some obscure Yahoo Group for sailboat nerds. Here’s a simple litmus test: If after spending a few minutes (or, more likely, a few minutes that become an hour) with this website or app you feel regret, it’s probably Kryptonite.

26. Put Your Toys Away Your real life begins after putting your house in order. —MARIE KONDO Picture this: You’re ready to work on your Highlight. Maybe it’s a short story you’ve wanted to write or a proposal you need to get done for work. So you grab your laptop, flip open the screen, type in your password, and… “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!” Every browser tab screams at you. Your email automatically refreshes to show a dozen new messages. Facebook, Twitter, CNN…headlines flash, notifications pop up all over the place. You can’t start on your Highlight just yet—you’ve got to tend to those tabs first and see what’s new. Now picture this: You grab your laptop, flip open the screen, and then…you see a beautiful photograph on your desktop and nothing else. No messages. No browser tabs. You signed out of email and chat at the end of the day yesterday, confident that if something urgent came up overnight, someone would call or text you. The silence is blissful. You’re ready to rock. Reacting to what’s in front of you is always easier than doing what you intend. And when they’re staring you right in the face, tasks such as checking email, responding to a chat, and reading the news feel urgent and important—but they rarely are. If you want to get into Laser mode faster, we recommend putting your toys away. That means signing out of apps like Twitter and Facebook, closing extra tabs, and turning off email and chat at the end of each day. Like a well-behaved kid, clean up af...

Jake During my decade at Google, I traveled a lot, but I made a commitment to myself not to do any work in the air. I decided airplane time was my time, and I dedicated it to writing. In ten years, I wrote a lot of adventure fiction in the air, and that was hugely satisfying. And my coworkers never complained that I was offline. Maybe they figured some satellite glitch or chatty seat mate was tripping me up. Or maybe, like me, they understood the magic of being offline in flight.

Jake Back on this page, I described how I make time for my Highlight late at night. That was when I did most of my writing on Sprint and my adventure novel. And I never could have done it without my vacation timer. Every time I sat down to write in the evenings, I’d get distracted by the Internet. For me, the primary culprits are sports news and email. Should I start writing…or should I quickly check for Seahawks news? Should I revise that paragraph? Ugh, that’s hard…instead, I’ll open my inbox…hmm, new notification from LinkedIn…I’ll archive that…Click! Click by click, I lost the will and the time to write. After two hours passed by in a blur, I’d go to bed, dejected because I’d stayed up late for nothing. I finally realized that if I was going to get things done at night, I had to either get better self-control (not happening) or shut off the Internet. With that in mind, I bought a $10 vacation timer, set it to turn off at 9:30 p.m., and plugged my Internet router into it. Holy smokes. At 9:30 p.m., the kids were asleep and the household chores were done. The timer clicked. And…just like that, there was no inbox and no Seahawks. No Netflix, no Twitter, no MacRumors. My laptop turned into a desert island, and my God, it was beautiful.

30. Watch Out for Time Craters When Jake was a kid, his family took a road trip to a place called Meteor Crater, Arizona. Meteor Crater is not just a cool name; it’s a real meteor crater in the middle of the desert. Tens of thousands of years ago, a 150-foot-wide chunk of rock smashed into the earth’s surface, blasting a crater about a mile in diameter. A young Jake stood on the blistered rock and imagined the awesome force of impact. The crater is thirty times the size of the meteor! It’s crazy to think about such a small object making such a big hole. Or maybe it’s not so crazy. After all, the same thing happens in our daily lives. Small distractions create much larger holes in our day. We call these holes “time craters,” and they work like this: Jake posts a tweet. (90 seconds) Over the next two hours, Jake returns to Twitter four times to see how his tweet is doing. Each time, he skims the newsfeed. Twice he reads an article somebody shared. (26 minutes) Jake’s tweet gets a few retweets, which feels good, so he begins mentally composing his next tweet. (Two minutes here, three minutes there, and so on) Jake posts another tweet, and the cycle begins all over again. A tiny tweet can easily smash a thirty-minute crater in your day, and that’s without switching costs. Each time Jake leaves Twitter and returns to his Highlight, he has to reload all the context into his brain before he’s back in Laser mode.9 So that time crater might actually be forty-five minutes, an hour, ...