Jake Knapp

John Zeratsky

'If you want to achieve more (without going nuts), read this book.' Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit What if you could step off the hamster wheel and start taking control of your time and attention? As creators of Google Ventures' renowned 'design sprint', Jake and John have helped hundreds of teams solve important problems by changing how they work. Building on the success of these sprints and their experience designing ubiquitous tech products like Gmail and YouTube, they spent years experimenting with their own personal habits and routines, looking for ways to help individuals optimize their energy, focus, and time. Now they've packaged the most effective tactics into a four-step daily framework that anyone can use to systematically design their days. Making time isn't about radically overhauling your lifestyle; it's about making small shifts in your environment to liberate yourself from constant busyness and distraction. Make Time is a must-read for anyone who has ever thought 'if only there were more hours in the day...'

How to focus on what matters every day

Make Time

Veerendranath

Change comes from resetting defaults, installing barriers and designing how you spend your time.

Practical and insightful. I feel it gets slightly repetitive. Love the frameworks in it.

Mason

If you’re a sucker for productivity books like this one, you won’t be surprised by the techniques that are mentioned throughout the book. These are meant to help you to find the time you need to do the things will make you ultimately happier. After all, this is what’s all about. To reduce (or even eliminate) the frustration that comes from not being able to find time for those things that matter to you. 

At the beginning of the book, there was a distinction that was made I found interesting which makes perfect sense. Rather than using the overloaded term “priority”, they call “highlights” to those things that really will make a difference to you. They don’t have to be necessarily a thing that anyone would call such as “productive”, but they include things that someone could argue against  (e.g.: playing video games).

I personally liked how the book was structured which make it very actionable.

Generally, I highly recommend this book if you struggle to prioritize your happiness like you’d like.

Raúl Barroso Moreno

If you’re a sucker for productivity books like this one, you won’t be surprised by the techniques that are mentioned throughout the book. These are meant to help you to find the time you need to do the things will make you ultimately happier. After all, this is what’s all about. To reduce (or even eliminate) the frustration that comes from not being able to find time for those things that matter to you. 

At the beginning of the book, there was a distinction that was made I found interesting which makes perfect sense. Rather than using the overloaded term “priority”, they call “highlights” to those things that really will make a difference to you. They don’t have to be necessarily a thing that anyone would call such as “productive”, but they include things that someone could argue against  (e.g.: playing video games).

I personally liked how the book was structured which make it very actionable.

Generally, I highly recommend this book if you struggle to prioritize your happiness like you’d like.

"A charming manifesto—as well as an intrepid do-it-yourself guide to building smart habits that stick. If you want to achieve more (without going nuts), read this book."—Charles Duhigg, bestselling author of The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better From the New York Times bestselling authors of Sprint, a simple 4-step system for improving focus, finding greater joy in your work, and getting more out of every day. Nobody ever looked at an empty calendar and said, "The best way to spend this time is by cramming it full of meetings!" or got to work in the morning and thought, Today I'll spend hours on Facebook! Yet that's exactly what we do. Why? In a world where information refreshes endlessly and the workday feels like a race to react to other people's priorities faster, frazzled and distracted has become our default position. But what if the exhaustion of constant busyness wasn't mandatory? What if you could step off the hamster wheel and start taking control of your time and attention? That's what this book is about. As creators of Google Ventures' renowned "design sprint," Jake and John have helped hundreds of teams solve important problems by changing how they work. Building on the success of these sprints and their experience designing ubiquitous tech products from Gmail to YouTube, they spent years experimenting with their own habits and routines, looking for ways to help people optimize their energy, focus, and time. Now they've packaged the most effective tactics into a four-step daily framework that anyone can use to systematically design their days. Make Time is not a one-size-fits-all formula. Instead, it offers a customizable menu of bite-size tips and strategies that can be tailored to individual habits and lifestyles. Make Time isn't about productivity, or checking off more to-dos. Nor does it propose unrealistic solutions like throwing out your smartphone or swearing off social media. Making time isn't about radically overhauling your lifestyle; it's about making small shifts in your environment to liberate yourself from constant busyness and distraction. A must-read for anyone who has ever thought, If only there were more hours in the day..., Make Time will help you stop passively reacting to the demands of the modern world and start intentionally making time for the things that matter.

How to Focus on What Matters Every Day

Manik

Quick read with practical suggestions. 

Quick read with very practical suggestions. I put several of the book's recommendations into practice with positive results.

Give it a read

Solid book including a lot of examples on how to design your day to maximize what’s important to you. 

Matt Challberg

Lee Herman

An interesting approach to focusing your attention on what you care about. The core idea is picking a Highlight for every day. The book provides a framework for why this works and over 80 specific approaches to keeping what you do and where you focus on what you want as opposed to what sucks you in. Along the way, the tips aim towards a healthier, more balanced life. While many of the tips may be familiar to readers of other books on improving focus, the Highlight framework is a little different take. And the authors wrote the book in an informal, conversational style that's fun to read. They are also very cognizant that not every tip will work for everyone, and not doctrinaire about your following every detail exactly as written. They suggest picking specific individual tips to work on, only a couple at once, and trying them and modifying them as needed or moving on if they don't work for you. If you decide you want to implement their tips, you'll need to buy the book so you can keep referring to it as you work on implementing various tips of your choosing. It's very much about making small changes and seeing what they do and building to big change from lots of little changes over time.

Kim Tyo-Dickerson

I really, really need to reclaim my time and attention. So this book, which has been sitting on my shelf since I bought a slew of productivity/time management books in 2019?, has turned into a Godsend. Knapp and Zeratsky give practical advise for getting to grips with time, all the more inspiring/believable from two major movers and shakers in IT, innovative tech enthusiasts from the Google side of things and the YouTube side of things. Their structure for considering and managing time in my tech-saturated personal and professional life has inspired me to re-craft my Calendar to focus in on one highlight per day (and how to choose it in the midst of competing school library demands), remove social media apps from my phone (I am not as tethered to my phone as many are, and they are still constantly tempting me to check notifications), turn off notifications in general, reduce email to non-instant-messenger status, and use/think about the terms "Busy Bandwagon" and "Infinity Pools" to give the many distractions that interrupt/hound my day some gentle name-calling that helps me get back to a more centered, fulfilled day of work and family time. Highly recommended for everyone, and a really beautiful book to read all the way through or pick and choose from their engaging "Tactics" framework each main idea, "Highlight" "Laser" "Energize" "Reflect." Just incredibly helpful, and I hope to share this learning with my Library team and wider school community.

Jolien De Landsheer

I'm not sure how to rate this because while I think this has quite a bit of solid, practical advice, there wasn't much that was new to me. Then again, I'm endlessly fascinated by productivity and the use of my time so I have spent a lot of time trying tactics already. If you're new to the subject, this would be an eye-opening and practical guide.

Manohar

4.5/5
Really good advice and framework for making time every day.
I found the framework and tactics really straightforward and easy to follow.
I'm trying to incorporate this into my daily life.
Let's see if I can stick with this for a long time.

Sujeevan Vijayakumaran

A lot of tactics and methods on how to focus on things. Nothing totally new for me in particular but still a good book to gather some ideas and inspiration.

Pavlos Nicolaou

Amazing book for time management

Do things you really appreciate and enjoy by avoiding mindless time wasters. Recommend to anyone who needs to learn how to avoid bad habits

Ivaylo Durmonski

We evolved to love novelty because this helped us find food and new opportunities. We evolved to love stories because they helped us learn how to communicate. Nowadays, though, these same things that helped us level-up as a species are collapsing our productivity.

Fortunately, we have Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day.

This short how-to book will equip you with the tools you need to abandon the self-sabotaging activities you do online. Quit the nasty habits that keep you falsely busy and prevent you from hopping inside the Infinitive pools that exist solely to fragment your attention.

The book is packed with bite-size tips that will help you, finally, manage your time. The tactics will motivate you to re-think your relationship with technology and finally make time for what’s important.

If you’re a clumsy internet user and if you constantly find yourself in the middle of the endless online abyss, this book is for you.

Key takeaway:

Take better care of your body. If your energy is low you’ll be more likely to ditch your rules and indulge in low-level activities. Regularly exercising will not only help you get fitter, but it will also help you resist the surrounding distractions.

Read more: https://durmonski.com/book-summaries/...

Brajendra V Singh

Pretty good and quick read. It is to the point and lays out actionable strategies regarding the apt title. 
I enjoyed reading it.

Halsted Mencotti Bernard

There's nothing mind-blowing in here, but it was useful to read snippets of different approaches, take what works for me, and leave the rest.

Amit Gawande

I cannot apply all the suggestions that the authors have to offer. But it is a fascinating list of a few easy to follow tactics, presented in a no-nonsense manner. The authors stay to the point; they don't ramble along as many of the self-help books authors tend to do.

I did find a few of the suggestions pretty useful and have already incorporated a couple. I can clearly see the benefit. What helped is that the authors worked in the tech industry in roles that I can associate well with. So, I could relate to many of the problems they talked about.

If you are at a full-time job and are struggling to get the right balance between work and life, this book would have a few strategies that you might find useful.

Lucas Coelho

This is a good place to start making time

I was familiar with the references they used to write this book, so I felt this was more a sanity check than discovering something new, but it was a very fun read. I like how Jake writes almost as if we were his friends. I would recommend reading this book before any time management book, making time is more important to managing time imho.

Luke Jones

First up, if you're on the fence about reading this book you should check out Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones instead. Atomic Habits covers a similar topic but executes it better.

This book is written by two people who are so far removed from the reality of day-to-day life that they needed to share how they uninstalled applications from their phones and prioritized things like family and hobbies.

Rather than being a useful self-help book, this is a reflection of an industry that prioritizes hard work and hustle over anything else. It's a solution to a problem that only exists because industries are manipulating people.

The summary is this: put your phone down, stop working so hard, and look for joy in things that are not work.

Levi Nelson

Nothing here is that earth-shattering. But ya know, sometimes you need a well-written and organized book to remind you of some common sense techniques. Worth the price just for the motivation it gave me!

Make Time How to focus on what matters every day

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