Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day

by Jake Knapp

While the Busy Bandwagon defaults to endless tasks, the Infinity Pools default to endless distraction.

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. 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.

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

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.

Doing more doesn’t help you create time for what matters; it just makes you feel even more frazzled and busy.

bigger than a to-do but smaller than a five-year goal. An activity I could plan for, look forward to, and appreciate when it was done. In other words, I needed to make sure every day had a highlight.

We want you to begin each day by thinking about what you hope will be the bright spot.

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.

The first strategy is all about urgency: What’s the most pressing thing I have to do today?

The second Highlight strategy is to think about satisfaction: At the end of the day, which Highlight will bring me the most satisfaction?

The third strategy focuses on joy: When I reflect on today, what will bring me the most joy?

To other people, some of your joyful Highlights may look like wastes of time: sitting at home reading a book, meeting a friend to play Frisbee in the park, even doing a crossword puzzle. Not to us. You only waste time if you’re not intentional about how you spend it.

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.

being intentional is an essential step toward making more time in your life.

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.

Choose Your Highlight 1. Write It Down 2. Groundhog It (or, “Do Yesterday Again”) 3. Stack Rank Your Life 4. Batch the Little Stuff 5. The Might-Do List 6. The Burner List 7. Run a Personal Sprint

The things you write down are more likely to happen. If you want to make time for your Highlight, start by writing it down. Make writing down your Highlight a simple daily ritual.

If you didn’t get to your Highlight, it’s probably still important. Repeat for a second chance. If you started your Highlight but didn’t finish it or if your Highlight was part of a bigger project, today is the perfect day to make progress or start a personal sprint (#7). Repeat to build momentum. If you’re establishing a new skill or routine, you’ll need repetition to cement the behavior. Repeat to create a habit. If yesterday’s Highlight brought you joy or satisfaction, hey, there’s nothing wrong with more of that! Repeat to keep the good times rolling.

recipe for ranking your big priorities:

Make a list of the big things that matter in your life.

Include only big stuff and try to use one- or two-word titles (this keeps the list high level).

Choose the one most important thing.

Consider what’s most meaningful to you, not what is most urgent.

Think about what needs the most effort or work.

Follow your heart.

Choose the second, third, fourth, and fifth most important things.

Rewrite the list in order of priority.

Draw a circle around number one.

Drawing the circle reinforces this prioritization—there’s something symbolic about putting your decision in ink.

Bundle up the small tasks and use batch processing to get them all done in one Highlight session. In other words, make a batch of small things your big thing.

This is a once-in-a-while tactic, a way of dealing with the necessary chores and tasks that otherwise invade our days. You’ll realize the real power of this tactic on the days you don’t use it: knowing you can safely ignore small, nonurgent tasks, letting them pile up while you focus on your Highlight.

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.

the Burner List is limited, and so it forces you to say no when you need to and stay focused on your number one priority.

Divide a sheet of paper into two columns. Get out a single blank sheet of paper and create two columns by drawing a line down the middle. The left-hand column is going to be your front burner, and the right-hand column your back burner.

Put your most important project on the front burner.

write the name of your most important project and underline it. Then list the to-dos for that top project. This should include any task you can do in the next few days to move the project forward.

Leave some counter space. Leave the rest of the first column empty. It might be tempting to fill the space with every task you can think of, but the Burner List is not intended to fill the paper’s surface area efficiently; it’s intended to make good use of your time and energy.

Put your second most important project on the back burner. At the top of the right-hand column, write the name of your second most important project and underline it, then list the related to-dos underneath.

Make a kitchen sink. Finally, about halfway down the right-hand column, list any miscellaneous tasks that you need to do but that don’t fit with project 1 or project 2. It doesn’t matter if they’re part of project 3 or project 4 or are totally random; they get chucked into the kitchen sink with everything else.

Whether you’re painting the living room, learning to juggle, or preparing a report for a new client, you’ll do better work and make faster progress if you keep at it for consecutive days. Just choose the same Highlight for several days in a row (breaking it up into steps for each day if you need to) and keep your mental computer running.

Make Time for Your Highlight 8. Schedule Your Highlight 9. Block Your Calendar 10. Bulldoze Your Calendar 11. Flake It Till You Make It 12. Just Say No 13. Design Your Day 14. Become a Morning Person 15. Nighttime Is Highlight Time 16. Quit When You’re Done

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.

scheduling your Highlight has another important benefit: It forces you to confront the trade-offs in how you spend your time.

Use daily “do not schedule” blocks to make room for your Highlight.

Play offense, not defense. Don’t use your “do not schedule” blocks just to avoid coworkers or get out of meetings. Be very intentional with any time you block—turn it into Energize time (see this page) or Highlight time.

Don’t be greedy. We did say you should block your calendar, but you shouldn’t fill it up entirely. It’s good to leave unblocked space for opportunities,

Take it seriously. If you don’t take those commitments seriously, other people won’t either. Treat these blocks like important meetings, and when people try to double-book you, remember Graham’s simple and effective comeback: “I’ve already got plans.”

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.

Flake It Till You Make It There will be days and weeks when you feel so busy and overscheduled that you can’t imagine how you’ll ever make time for your Highlight. When this happens, ask yourself what you can cancel. Can you skip a meeting, push back a deadline, or ditch your plans with a friend?