Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day

by Jake Knapp

Make Time is not about productivity. It’s not about getting more done, finishing your to-dos faster, or outsourcing your life. Instead, it’s a framework designed to help you actually create more time in your day for the things you care about,

The Busy Bandwagon is our culture of constant busyness—the overflowing inboxes, stuffed calendars, and endless to-do lists. According to the Busy Bandwagon mindset, if you want to meet the demands of the modern workplace and function in modern society, you must fill every minute with productivity. After all, everyone else is busy. If you slow down, you’ll fall behind and never catch up.

Infinity Pools are apps and other sources of endlessly replenishing content. If you can pull to refresh, it’s an Infinity Pool. If it streams, it’s an Infinity Pool. This always-available, always-new entertainment is your reward for the exhaustion of constant busyness.

Nobody ever looked at an empty calendar and said, “The best way to spend this time is to cram it full of random meetings!” Nobody ever said, “The most important thing today is everybody else’s whims!” Of course not. That would be crazy.

What do you want from your days and from your life? What would happen if you could override these defaults and create your own?

The faster you run on the hamster wheel, the faster it spins.

Make Time is a framework for choosing what you want to focus on, building the energy to do it, and breaking the default cycle so that you can start being more intentional about the way you live your life. Even if you don’t completely control your own schedule—and few of us do—you absolutely can control your attention.

Being more productive didn’t mean I was doing the most important work; it only meant I was reacting to other people’s priorities faster.

something magic happens when you start the day with one high-priority goal.

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.

we got more done when we banned devices.

Experimenting allowed us to improve the process,

this experimental approach also allowed us to be kinder to ourselves when we made mistakes—after all, every mistake was just a data point, and we could always try again tomorrow.

that’s just it: Reclaiming your time and attention can be weirdly easy.

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.

Every day, you’ll choose a single activity to prioritize and protect in your calendar.

adjust your technology so you can find Laser mode.

To achieve focus and make time for what matters, your brain needs energy, and that energy comes from taking care of your body.

charge your battery with exercise, food, sleep, quiet, and face-to-face time.

take a few notes. It’s super simple: You’ll decide which tactics you want to continue and which ones you want to refine or drop.2

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.

None of us can be perfect eaters, perfectly productive, perfectly mindful, and perfectly rested all the time.

Perfection is a distraction—another shiny object taking your attention away from your real priorities.

So instead of thinking of these tactics as “more things you have to do,” consider ways to make them part of your normal life.

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.