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I must have spent at least 500+ hours reading time management books over the course of my life, and Make Time, by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky is one of the standouts.

It’s one of the more, practical, down-to-earth, and genuinely helpful books on the subject, and their ideas have saved me several hundred hours at least. And that’s only in the couple of years since I read it! Over my entire lifetime?

So it’s well worth a read if you’re one of those people (like me) who never seems to have enough daylight left before tomorrow to get everything done.

I’ve written 5,000+ words on this book below, so I won’t repeat myself here, but I found Make Time to be tremendously helpful.

This is actually an older, updated and revised book breakdown from a few years ago, as I’m going back and updating all my old book breakdowns (for quality reasons) and all my old Patreon book notes (for organizational reasons).

I’ll be publishing at least one new book breakdown a month, but instead of trying to update all my old breakdowns and publish a new one each week, I’m going to take my own advice (and the advice of Jake and John) and update three old breakdowns each month too, for a total of four.

That may have been more explanation than you wanted! So…

Before our coffees get cold, let’s hit the books!

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This Book is For:

*People who feel completely overwhelmed by how much there is to do, how much the modern world expects of them, and how hard it is to make positive, lasting changes in their lives.

*Anyone who wants a straightforward, easy-to-understand system for making even just a little (or a lot) more time for what truly matters, and for ditching what doesn't.

*High-performers and super-achievers who want to gain a competitive edge against a global system designed and optimized for stealing their attention and focus away from what will really make a difference in their lives and businesses.

Summary:

Books are like a handful of silence, and books like Make Time are like an oasis of sanity and calm within the chaos of our busy, ever-accelerating lives.

The authors, Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky are two tech innovators with deep domain experience and expertise who recently made the shift from being part of the problem to being part of the solution.

Between the two of them, they've positively impacted Silicon Valley culture through their "design sprints" at Google, and they're responsible for helping to develop awesome tools and resources that many of us use (and misuse) every day, such as Gmail and YouTube.

They've also spent years experimenting with their own habits and routines and engaging thoughtfully with the deeper questions of the proper role of technology in our lives, and the end result is this book.

Make Time presents a dead-simple, 4-step system for setting daily targets, improving focus, eliminating distractions, optimizing energy, and reflecting on what works for you and what doesn't so that you can begin to design your days and become the intentional architect of your own life.

Very simply, it goes like this:

Step 1: Select one activity, task, or project to be the main focus of your day.

Step 2: Direct your attention completely toward accomplishing that one thing.

Step 3: Fuel your body to give your mind the energy it needs to stay on task.

Step 4: Assess what worked best to improve your focus, and what you could do differently next time.

Jake and John also identify two primary obstacles to deep focus and daily joy, which they refer to as Infinity Pools and the Busy Bandwagon.

Briefly, something is an Infinity Pool if you can scroll or refresh at any time to access a virtually infinite reservoir of new and stimulating content that's designed to constantly pull you away from your most important work. Think YouTube, Gmail, Netflix, etc.

The Busy Bandwagon refers to the always-on, go-go-go ethos of relentless productivity and 24/7/365 access to your mind by anyone who wants you to place their priorities ahead of your own. Demanding bosses, unrealistic expectations of coworkers, the treadmill of email, etc.

That being said, Make Time isn't supposed to be a complete diagnosis and cure for the state of distraction in the world today - it's just supposed to help you make some time for the things that are actually important to you and to bring more joy into your work and your life. And at that task, the book succeeds beautifully.

Alongside the 4-step strategy for making time, the authors include 87 different tactics that will actually help you do that!

They also place a heavy emphasis on experimentation, making a case for trying out the tactics that look interesting, useful, or doable, reflecting on what works for you and what doesn't, and trying again tomorrow.

They also don't always agree on all of the tactics, and so often you'll have extremely helpful asides from each author explaining why one of them thinks a certain tactic is a good idea, and why the other author doesn't use it in his life.

The whole book feels like a conversation between the two of them and the reader - like the person reading it is a really terrific friend of theirs that the authors want to see succeed and be happy.

Speaking for myself, I think the experimental approach is the right one. Any one of these 87 tactics could be life-changing for you, but that same tactic may do nothing for me, and vice versa.

For example, I've adopted a "Clear Home Screen" philosophy for my smartphone, and I'll never go back to having all these icons cluttering up my screen, with the little red numbers and dots and everything screaming at me that I have notifications waiting for me.

I also have something I call a "follow-up list" where I write down any errant thoughts that come to me while I'm working on something so that I can...follow up...later.

We'll get into all these tactics and ideas below, but perhaps the biggest thread running through the whole book is the commitment to mindfully addressing the defaults in our lives.

Often, the reason why we do something is that we've always done it that way, or the phone came that way, etc., when it's really not the best thing at all for our focus and our capacity to pay attention to the things that really matter to us in our lives.

Gaining distance from your defaults is going to be one of the greatest benefits that this book will give you. It's also uniquely difficult to do, because, by definition, defaults are basically habits. They're automatic, and so we need a consciously-chosen system for changing those defaults.

Make Time is that system; Jake and John are your friendly and knowledgeable guides, and freedom is about to become your new normal.

READ THE FULL BOOK BREAKDOWN HERE

Key Ideas:

#1: Infinity Pools and Busy Bandwagons

There are at least two giant, ugly forces conspiring to steal away your focus and attention, and therefore, your life. They are Infinity Pools and the Busy Bandwagon, both of which we'll discuss briefly here.

Infinity Pools, as briefly explained in the Summary above, are basically any app or service with a near-infinite supply of content that's capable of keeping you distracted until the end of your days.

They're literally designed to be as addictive as possible, and their business model is distraction. They make money based on how long they can distract you from your biggest dreams and ambitions, and the longer they hook you for, the more advertising you see, and thus the more money they make.

This isn't necessarily an "evil" thing or even a "bad" thing. Everyone needs money to survive, and many of these apps and services do make our lives unquestionably better. But is distraction what you want your life to be about? Isn't there more than this?

Equally destructive as the endless distraction offered by the Infinity Pools is the ethos of constant busyness drilled into us by the "Busy Bandwagon," or the idea that we always have to be "productive," and "moving forward" if we want to be seen as valuable members of society.

Being busy nowadays is seen as a sign that you're really "making something of yourself," and so there's this constant pressure to perform, to be available, to be "online." Well, that's nonsense, and you simply have to pull back from this cultural gravity if you want to make time for what's most important to you in life.

Ryan Holiday makes an incredibly valuable distinction between "alive time" and "dead time," but to people on the Busy Bandwagon, alive time just means cramming more and more stuff into each day in a hectic and reckless pursuit of productivity. Even worse, the more productive you are, the more productive people expect you to be.

Real alive time is so much more than that, however, and you need to fight back against these two forces if you truly want to come alive.

But, by their very nature and design, Infinity Pools are extremely tough to pull yourself out of, and the Busy Bandwagon doesn't make it easy on anyone to simply jump off and go their own way. So how can we escape these two forces?

#2: The 4-Step Strategy for Making Time

The above quote gives a pretty good overview of the 4-step strategy laid out in Make Time. We're going to discuss each element of this strategy here in this Key Ideas section.

First comes choosing your Highlight, which is basically the ONE Thing that you want your day to be about. Ideally, it would be something that is important, gives you satisfaction, or leads to joy, and perhaps even all three.

Second, you'll create the conditions for perfect focus, or what the authors call Laser mode. This involves expanding your freedom from, and freedom to. More on that later.

Next, we'll discuss amping up your energy, which really is one of the major keys to making time, and getting the most out of your life in general. As the Romantic poet William Blake wrote, "energy is eternal delight."

And finally, you reflect on how your day actually went, what you did well, what you could improve on or adjust going forward, and what, specifically, you want tomorrow to look like.

#3: The Highlight of Your Day

Your Highlight is something that, if it were the only thing you did or accomplished that day, you could call that day a success.

Of course, you're going to do many more things in any one day than just your Highlight, but it's the ONE Thing that you're going to make sure that you make time for each and every day.

It'll likely change every day or most days, but one of the keys to making time for what's important is to schedule that thing first and then schedule everything else around it.

Crucially, you want to choose your Highlight ahead of time. It's not about looking back to see what the Highlight of your day was, but rather it's about choosing what you want the Highlight of your day to be.

The authors suggest choosing something that you can do or complete within 60-90 minutes, although of course, you could also break up something that'll take longer into several Highlights.

For example, building a play fort in the backyard for your kids could be your Highlight, but instead of trying to finish it in 90 minutes (unlikely), you could make it the Highlight for several days in a row, and then do 60-90 minutes of work building it each day.

To help you choose your Highlight, the authors also suggest that it be something that's either important, satisfying, or joyful. I think those are good criteria for making your choice.

Your Highlight should be something that absolutely needs to get done at some point (so why not make it your Highlight for today?), something that you'll look back on with satisfaction after having completed it, and/or something that brings you a lot of joy in the process of actually doing it.

A few more key points to keep in mind:

*Your Highlight should be bigger than just a 10-minute to-do list item, and smaller than a whole project.

*If you don't finish your Highlight in one day, you can just make tomorrow's Highlight the completion of today's Highlight.

*You can bundle several smaller tasks into one Highlight that takes 60-90 minutes in total. This gives you the added benefit of clearing your mind by clearing away all these minor drags on your attention all at once.

*You should consider blocking regular time in your calendar for your Highlight, whenever that makes sense in your schedule. If it appears at the same time every single day, you'll get into the habit of dedicating that time to your most important work, and your wins will stack on top of each other day after day, week after week.

*Perhaps most importantly, you need to write your Highlight down. Make it real by writing it in your calendar or wherever else you're likely to see it. And then treat it with the respect it deserves by thinking of it like an appointment with yourself that you would never break.

#4: Get Laser-Focused

Effective barriers are the key to focus. Like Odysseus in Homer's epic, you have to plug your ears against the siren calls of the Infinity Pools and the endless demands of the Busy Bandwagon and get down to the real business of living.

This involves both an element of freedom from, as well as freedom to.

Barriers are an example of freedom from, because you're blocking out distractions and cutting out all the noise so that you can focus. Barriers create freedom from distraction.

Building up your energy levels, which we'll tackle next, has to do with freedom to, because you're giving yourself the personal power you need to dedicate toward achieving your goals. Once you have your energy and vitality back, your freedom to pursue what's important to you returns as well.

You could have a completely distraction-free iPhone and a clear calendar, but if you don't have energy and drive, you likely won't do anything with that newfound freedom from. With this two-pronged approach, you're blocking out by erecting barriers against distraction and tuning in by increasing your work capacity and energy levels.

There are a ton of tactics in this book that will help you distance yourself from distractions, but I'll just lay out a few of them here.

First, you can log out of any Infinity Pools that you have on your phone or computer. It's all about adding friction - making it more difficult to engage in self-destructive behavior instead of doing something meaningful and important with your time.

Even just the few extra seconds and the little bit of effort it takes to remember your password and type it in can stop you from actually doing it. Or, at least, it will give you the space and the mental clarity to be able to ask, "Do I really want to be distracted right now?"

Of course, you could also just remove those apps and services in the first place (probably saving yourself quite a bit of money in the process!) and maintain a distraction-free iPhone.

At the very least, you can disable notifications and make it so that only emergency contacts get through. I do this myself and it works wonders. I get text notifications and phone calls - and nothing else. If I want to see if more people followed me on Instagram or whatever, I actually have to go into the app to do it. Most of the time, I just don't.

Another thing you can do is skip the morning check-in. Most people - myself included, if I'm being honest - reach for their phones first thing in the morning to "make the rounds" and check emails, socials, etc.

Personally, this doesn't really have a negative effect on my life or productivity, so I find that I can still do these check-ins and have it not harm my focus too much. But people are different, and that's why there's such a big emphasis in this book on personal experimentation.

If checking your email as soon as you wake up fills you with dread and exposes you to near-instant negativity before you can even think straight, then maybe you should wait an hour before you log on, just to give yourself space to step back and make time for focus and peace.

Email is another huge focus-killer, as many people are painfully aware. It's a vicious cycle too, because, as the author of Four Thousand Weeks describes, the better you are at responding to email the more emails you get, so you end up running down this negative email spiral that's very tough to get out of.

Fortunately, there are a ton of things you can do here, such as unsubscribe to as many mailing lists as possible (except the The Reading Life, of course!), batch your emails either at the beginning or end of your day, and manage the expectations of your coworkers, which strategy is discussed in the Book Notes section of this breakdown.

#5: Energize

A complete program for optimizing your recovery and maximizing your performance is beyond the scope of this book, but Make Time touches on the main elements of creating one for yourself. And fortunately for us all, it doesn't have to be complicated.

By focusing your efforts on just four main areas - sleep, diet, exercise, and social connection - you can get most of the benefits that you could get from some absolutely perfect, totally complete system that would take up your entire day.

No one has time for that, and so for most people, the right approach is the "80/20" way of doing the 20% of things that will lead to 80% of the results.

If you have more time, you can do more, and perhaps squeeze out some marginal energy benefits and all that, but instead of buying a whole bunch of expensive supplements and gadgets, you can just focus on those four main areas.

To tackle your sleep, I highly, HIGHLY recommend the book, Why We Sleep, by Matthew Walker, which goes much further in-depth on all this stuff, but really, you just need to make a few key changes to your sleep routine to get the majority of the benefits.

For starters, most people need between 7-9 hours of sleep each night, and that's non-negotiable. You might be able to get away with less for a little while, but it will catch up to you, and you will start to build up a "sleep debt" that will wreck your focus and make you less productive every hour that you're awake when you should be sleeping.

You'll also want to make some simple changes like keeping your phone and other electronic devices out of your bedroom at night and turning off all screens at least an hour before bed.

Going to sleep when it gets dark and rising with the sun obeys your body's natural rhythms and keeps you within the sleep pattern that human beings evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to respond to the best.

For exercise, that doesn't need to be complicated either. It's all about adding extra movement to your day, even if that means adding "planned inconveniences" like parking further away when you go to the grocery store, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, and generally choosing to walk and move around more often than you sit.

Twenty minutes or so of exercise doesn't sound like a lot, but it's plenty when it comes to boosting your mood and energy levels.

Diet is another huge topic that I can't cover completely in just a paragraph, but I can lay out the basics in just one sentence: Eat less, eat fewer processed foods, avoid sugar and chemicals, get enough protein, make sure you drink plenty of water, and add greens wherever possible. That's really it.

Again, you could go super in-depth with supplements and diet trackers, and so on, but the basics will carry you most of the way.

The same goes for the social connection element! Just spend more time with people! Get out there in the middle of humanity, extend kindness to others, join groups, see friends as often as possible, and have real conversations with real people, preferably not from behind a screen.

For most people, not much of what I've just laid out here will be new or groundbreaking. But that's just the thing. These are basic, foundational elements of well-being, but when you neglect them, you break down.

When you do have these basic elements in place, though, everything about your life gets better, setting off a positive compound effect where you will have more energy, which will help clear your mind, which will help you focus, which will help you make more time.

#6: Time to Reflect

Socrates famously said that "the unexamined life is not worth living." While that may be a bit extreme (I believe that all life is worth living), there's no question that repeated reflection, and taking action on what you learn from that reflection unquestionably makes your life better.

How can you improve on something if you don't know exactly how it's going now?

What gets measured gets managed, and so this fourth step of the Make Time strategy is all about looking back, asking what worked and what didn't, and seeing where you could improve going forward.

This should be kept as simple as possible (but no simpler), because it's true that the slightly imperfect system that actually makes your life better is much more effective than the absolutely perfect system that you never even use.

So to utilize reflection, simply take a few minutes at the end of each day and ask yourself a few questions about how it went. Take a look at your Highlight, and see whether you made time for it, how effectively you were able to use that time, and what you might want your Highlight to be for tomorrow.

Look back at the tactics you used that day and see if they worked for you. If you were to use the same tactics tomorrow, would you change anything about the way you implement them? Was the type of exercise you got today something that you can see yourself maintaining for a longer period of time? Is there a new tactic that you want to try?

Go through each element of the Make Time strategy - Highlight, Focus, Energize - and take stock of how well you were able to make it work for you and fit into your life.

That's it! It doesn't have to be complicated, and the simpler and easier it is to do the more likely you'll keep doing it again and again until it's a habit - until it's just something that you do.

READ ALL THE KEY IDEAS HERE

Book Notes:

READ ALL THE BOOK NOTES HERE

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Action Steps:

#1: Choose Your Highlight for Today

This is one of the most important things you can possibly do for yourself each day. Having a focus, a direction, something that you're making time for lets you seize each day and helps you make the most of it - it really does make all the difference.

The writer Annie Dillard said that "a schedule is a net for catching days," so it's crucially important that your Highlight makes it onto your schedule, and that you set aside a time when it is definitely going to get done.

A good general guideline for choosing a Highlight is that it should take you between 60-90 minutes, and it should be anything that's important to you, that you'd feel satisfied after having completed, and/or that's likely to bring you joy during the process of doing it.

Ask yourself: “What will the Highlight of your day be today?”

#2: Invent a Deadline

Deadlines are wonderful tools for inspiring action. Unfortunately, however, when they're imposed by someone else, when they're not under your direct control, or when they're unrealistic, they can be a source of extreme stress instead.

One way out of this is to set a deadline for yourself and to make beating that deadline into a kind of game that you play with yourself.

Parkinson's Law states that work will expand to fill the amount of time set aside to complete it, so if you give yourself less time to complete a task, you'll be forced to find a faster or more creative way of getting it done.

Your Action Step here thus becomes: Identify a task or part of a project that absolutely needs to get done, and/or will lead to greater rewards down the line. You could also choose your Highlight from the previous Action Step.

Then, put it in your calendar, giving yourself less time than you think you need to complete it. If at first you think it’s going to take three hours, give yourself two. Finally, when the appointed time arrives, block out every single distraction, put your phone on airplane mode, etc., and give yourself completely to finishing this one task or project.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll find that you complete the work more or less within the timeframe you set for yourself, and the increased (self-imposed) time pressure tightened your attention, sharpened your focus, and helped you get into the flow.

#3: Have a Real Conversation with Someone Who Lights You Up

Some people give you energy, and others drain your energy. You've probably noticed this in your own life where, after speaking to some people, you feel energized and alive, positively motivated to get out there and enjoy life. And yet, there are other people who seem to have the opposite effect on you.

Seek out people from the first group, and spend as much time with them as you possibly can. Every day, try to have at least one 5-minute conversation with someone who makes you feel wonderful after hanging out with them, and then note your energy level afterwards.

It can be tough to cut ties with the people in the second group - the complainers, the energy-suckers, and the misanthropes - and you should still treat them well and with kindness; but note your energy levels after hanging out with people like that and see if you wouldn't prefer different company! Most people are shocked at the positive difference this makes in their lives. So give it a try!

READ ALL THE ACTION STEPS HERE

This Book on Amazon:

Make Time, by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky

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OK, that’s it for now…

I’ve got plenty more excellent book recommendations coming your way soon though!

And if you want to learn how I’ve built an audience of 160,000+ followers across social media, became a full-time creator, and how I’m rapidly growing my audience and my profits in 2025, join us inside Creator Launch Academy and that’s exactly what I’ll teach you — we’d love to have you in the community!

With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your day!

Until next time…happy reading!

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

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