Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day

by Jake Knapp

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.