“Moment by moment and day by day, you can make your life your own.”

“With the average person spending four-plus hours a day on their smartphone and another four-plus hours watching TV shows, distraction is quite literally a full-time job."

“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."

“Each day’s goal is ambitious, but it’s just one thing.”

“Perfection is a distraction - another shiny object taking your attention away from your real priorities."

“We do not remember days, we remember moments.”

“One of our goals with Make Time is to steer you away from the impossible vision of perfectly planned days and toward a life that's more joyful and less reactive. That means doing some things just because you like doing them."

“You only waste time if you’re not intentional about how you spend it.”

“Don’t assume there's a good reason behind the length of every meeting or the time of day it shows up on your calendar or even why you were invited. Office schedules aren't formed by some grand design; they congeal organically, like pond scum. It's okay to clean things up."

“Each time one service rolls out an irresistible new feature or improvement, it ups the ante for its competitors. If one app or site or game doesn't keep you riveted, you've got an infinite number of options two taps away. Everything is up against everything else all the time. It's survival of the fittest, and the survivors are damn good."

“We’ve been inside those companies, and they're inhabited by well-meaning nerds who want to make your days better. For the most part, the nerds are doing just that, because the best of modern technology is remarkable, and delightful, and it does make our lives more convenient and more fun. When we use our smartphones to navigate an unfamiliar city, or have a video call with a friend, or download an entire book in mere seconds, it's like having superpowers."

“And yet it would be a relief in a way not to be bothered with it any more...Sometimes I have felt like it was an eye looking at me...I found I couldn't rest without it in my pocket."

“First, delete Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, SnapChat, and so on (including whatever else has been invented since we wrote this). Don't worry. If you change your mind later, it is very easy to install these apps again. Anything with an infinite supply of interesting content should be deleted. This includes games, news apps, and streaming video like YouTube. If you might refresh it obsessively and/or lose hours without meaning to, get rid of it."

“Notifications are not your friends. They’re nonstop attention thieves.”

“A blank home screen provides a tiny moment of quiet every time you use your phone. It's an intentional inconvenience, a small pause - a speed bump keeping distraction one step away. If you unlocked your phone reflexively, a blank home screen offers you a moment to ask yourself, 'Do I really want to be distracted right now?'"

“If you wear a watch, you can keep your smartphone out of sight. And when it's out of sight, it's easier to ignore."

“When you wake up in the morning, whether you slept for five hours or ten, you've had a nice long break from the Busy Bandwagon and the Infinity Pools. This is a golden moment. The day is fresh, your brain is rested, and you have no reason to feel distracted yet. No news items to stress about, no work emails to stew over.

Savor it. Don't reach for email, Twitter, Facebook, or the news right away. It's very tempting to do a check-in first thing in the morning and get the latest updates; after all, something in the world always changes overnight. But as soon as you fire up that screen, you start a tug-of-war of attention between the present moment and everything out there on the Internet.

Put it off. The longer you postpone the morning check-in - until 9am, 10am, or even after lunch - the longer you preserve that feeling of rested calm and the easier it is to get into Laser mode."

“The whole concept of breaking news runs on a very potent myth: You need to know what's going on around the world, and you need to know now. Smart people follow the news. Responsible people follow the news. Grown-ups follow the news. Don't they?

We've got some breaking news of our own: You don't need to follow the daily news. True breaking news will find you, and the rest isn't urgent or just doesn't matter.

To see what we mean, check out today's newspaper. Or go to your favorite news website. Look at the top headlines and think critically about each one. Will that headline change any decisions you make today? How many of those headlines will become obsolete by tomorrow, next week, or next month? How many of those headlines are designed to provoke anxiety? 

'If it bleeds, it leads' is a newsroom cliche, but it's true. Most news is bad news, and none of us can shrug off the nonstop bombardment of stories about conflict, corruption, crime, and human suffering without it taking a toll on our mood and our ability to focus.

Even once-a-day news is a persistent, anxiety-provoking, outrage-inciting distraction. We're not saying you have to cut yourself off completely. Instead, we suggest reading the news weekly.

Anything less frequent is likely to make you feel like you're at sea, unmoored from human civilization. Anything more frequent and you'll feel fogged in, able to focus only on what's in front of you. That fog can easily obscure the important activities and people you want to prioritize."

“Reacting to what’s in front of you is always easier than doing what you intend.”

“Even on an airplane, you have to change a couple of defaults to make time. First, if your seat has a screen, turn it off when you sit down. Second, if your airplane has Wi-Fi, don't pay for it. Make these two choices at the beginning of your flight, fasten your safety belt, and enjoy Laser mode at 35,000 feet."

“You can find browser extensions and other apps to limit your time on specific sites or to disable everything for a predetermined length of time."

“Ask a brave friend to change your Wi-Fi password and keep it secret from you for twenty-four hours."

“Every time you check your email or another messaging service, you're basically saying, 'Does any random person need my time right now?' And if you respond right away, you're sending another signal both to them and to yourself: 'I'll stop what I'm doing to put other people's priorities ahead of mine no matter who they are or what they want.' Spelled out, this sounds insane. But instant-response insanity is our culture's default behavior."

“Of course, when you limit your email time or increase your response time, you may need to manage the expectations of your colleagues and others. You could say something like this: 'I'm slow to respond because I need to prioritize some important projects, but if your message is urgent, send me a text.'

This message can be conveyed in person, via email, or even as an autoresponse or signature. The wording is carefully designed. The justification 'I need to prioritize some important projects' is eminently reasonable and sufficiently vague.

The offer to respond to text messages provides an in-case-of-emergency plan, but because the threshold for texting or calling is higher than it is with chat and email, you'll probably be interrupted much less often."

"You don’t have to give up television, but if you find it hard to reduce your hours, you might want to get extreme and try going cold turkey for a month. Unplug the TV, put it in the closet, or take it to a storage locker ten miles away and hide the key. Do whatever you have to do - just go without for a month.

When the month is up, think about everything you did with that extra time and decide how much of it you want to give back to your TV."

“The closed door is your way of telling the world and yourself that you mean business."

“Shifting your focus to something that your mind perceives as a doable, completable task will create a real increase in positive energy, direction, and motivation."

“Stare at the blank screen, or switch to paper, or walk around, but keep your focus on the project at hand. Even when your conscious mind feels frustrated, some quiet part of your brain is processing and making progress. Eventually, you will get unstuck, and then you'll be glad you didn't give up."

“If you want energy for your brain, you need to take care of your body.”

“What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while."

“Research shows that the most important cognitive, health, and mood benefits of exercise can be attained in just twenty minutes."

“The energy and mood boost from exercise last about a day, so to feel good every day, get some exercise every day. As an added bonus, daily habits are easier to keep than sometimes habits."

“Don’t stress about perfection. If you manage to exercise only four out of seven days this week, hey, four is better than three! If you don't feel up for a twentyish-minute workout today, get out there for ten. Sometimes a ten-minute walk or run or swim will turn into twenty or longer because it feels so great - you won't want to stop once you start moving. Other times, it'll just be ten minutes, and that's cool, too. It's better than zero, and you still get an energy boost."

“Knowing all this, Ryan devised a perfect system that allowed him to enjoy as much coffee as possible, maintain steady energy, and not fry his nerves or disrupt his sleep. In the end, his personalized formula, backed by science and proven by experience, was crazy simple:

*Wake up without caffeine (in other words, get out of bed, eat breakfast, and start the day without any coffee)

*Have the first cup between 9:30 and 10:30am.

*Have the last cup between 1:30 and 2:30pm."

“In the morning, your body naturally produces lots of cortisol, a hormone that helps you wake up. When cortisol is high, caffeine doesn't do much for you (except for temporarily relieving your caffeine addiction symptoms). For most folks, cortisol is highest between 8am and 9am, so for ideal morning energy, experiment with having that first cup of coffee at 9:30am."

“The tricky thing about caffeine is that if you wait to drink it until you get tired, it's too late: the adenosine has already hooked up with your brain, and it's hard to shake the lethargy. We'll repeat that because it's a crucial detail: If you wait until you get tired, it's too late.

Instead, think about when your energy regularly dips - for most of us, it's after lunch - and have coffee (or your caffeinated beverage of choice) thirty minutes beforehand."

“A 2008 University of Michigan study compared the cognitive performance of people who had just taken a walk in the city with that of people who had just taken a walk in a park. The nature walkers did 20 percent better."

“It’s a cruel irony of modern life that we're surrounded by people yet more isolated than ever. This is a big deal, especially if you consider the findings from Harvard's 75-year Study of Adult Development: People with strong relationships are more likely to live long, healthy, fulfilling lives. We're not claiming that talking to strangers in the grocery store checkout line will help you live to be 100 - but spending time with people face-to-face can be a big energy booster."

"Even if it's only once a week, reach out to friends whom you admire, who inspire you, who make you laugh, who let you be yourself. Spending time with interesting, high-energy people is one of the best - and most enjoyable - ways to recharge your battery."

“When you eat without screens, you hit three of our five Energize principles at once. You're less likely to mindlessly shovel unhealthy food in your mouth, you're more likely to have an energizing face-to-face conversation with another human, and you're creating space in your day to give your brain a rest from its constant busyness. And all this while doing something you have to do anyway!"

“Sleeping late on weekends is basically like giving yourself jet lag: It confuses your internal clock and makes it even harder to bounce back from the original deficit. So just as you would when traveling to a different time zone, she recommends resisting the temptation to oversleep and trying to stick as closely as possible to your regular schedule."

“A 2013 study at the University of California, Santa Barbara found that students who meditated as little as ten minutes a day for two weeks improved their average GRE (Graduate Record Examinations, a super hard test) verbal scores from 460 to 520. That's a pretty awesome brain boost for a pretty minimal effort."

“Changing defaults isn’t always easy, so it's helpful to look back on the day through a grateful lens. Quite often you'll find that even if lots of things didn't go your way, your hard work of making time still paid off with a moment you're grateful for. When that happens, the feeling of gratitude becomes a powerful incentive to do the steps again tomorrow."

“There’s an invisible premise behind Make Time: You're already close. Small shifts can put you in control. If you reduce a few distractions, increase your physical and mental energy just a bit, and focus your attention on one bright spot, a blah day can become extraordinary.

It doesn't require an empty calendar - just sixty to ninety minutes of attention on something special. The goal is to make time for what matters, find more balance, and enjoy today a little more."

“I’m always more diligent when somebody's watching, even when that somebody is me."

“Do not ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

“Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem. Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experience you actually do have time for – and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what counts the most.”

“It turns out that when people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to; they never quite manage to keep up with the Joneses, because whenever they’re in danger of getting close, they nominate new and better Joneses with whom to try to keep up.

As a result, they work harder and harder, and soon busyness becomes an emblem of prestige. Which is clearly completely absurd: for almost the whole of history, the entire point of being rich was not having to work so much.”

“The more firmly you believe it ought to be possible to find time for everything, the less pressure you’ll feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a portion of your time.”

"What’s the ONE Thing that I can do, such that by doing it, everything else would be either easier or unnecessary?"

"Where I’d had huge success, I had narrowed my concentration to one thing, and where my success varied, my focus had too."

"You do the right thing and then you do the next right thing. Over time it adds up, and the geometric potential of success is unleashed. The domino effect applies to the big picture, like your work or your business, and it applies to the smallest moment in each day when you're trying to decide what to do next.

Success builds on success, and as this happens, over and over, you move toward the highest success possible.

When you see someone who has a lot of knowledge, they learned it over time. When you see someone who has a lot of skills, they developed them over time. When you see someone who has done a lot, they accomplished it over time. When you see someone who has a lot of money, they earned it over time.

The key is over time. Success is built sequentially. It's one thing at a time."

“The first and most fundamental threat to your Future Self is not having hope in your future. Without hope, the present loses meaning. Without hope, you don't have clear goals or a sense of purpose for your life. Without hope, there is no way. Without hope, you decay."

“You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain. If you treat your future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you will give up trying to master it."

“Anything that isn’t taking you toward your Future Self is a lesser goal."

“The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day, and then you are being told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the world's attention burns."

"You take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture - like obesity, or depression, or addiction - and you offer people, in upbeat language, a simplistic individual solution.

It sounds optimistic, because you are telling them that the problem can be solved, and soon - but it is, in fact, cruel, because the solution you are offering is so limited, and so blind to the deeper causes, that for most people, it will fail."

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

#1: "What defaults are you accepting blindly, and how could you begin to take charge of them and possibly change them?"

#2: “If, at the end of the day, someone asks you, 'What was the highlight of your day?', what do you want your answer to be?"

#3: "What is your 'distraction kryptonite?' Which Infinity Pool is your biggest nemesis?"

#4: "What happens in your mind when you do finally sit down and attempt to focus? Do you find it easy to settle in and find flow? Or does your mind immediately resist? Why do you think that is?"

#5: "What else is affecting your ability to focus that wasn't addressed in the book?"

#6: "How could you let someone close to you - or someone you work with - know that the ridiculous demands of the Busy Bandwagon are starting to become too much for you? Might they be relieved to know that it's not just them?"

#7: "Who or what are you making time for? Who or what is important enough to you that you've finally decided to take action and regain control of your focus?"

#8: "What is the largest time crater that you usually create in your day? Could you find a way to reduce the size of that crater or eliminate it altogether? If you did that successfully, how much time would you save?"

#9: "How long does it usually take you to settle into your work and enter a flow state? What were the conditions that were present that allowed you to enter that state before? Could you recreate those conditions today?"

#10: "Which of the four Energize elements - sleep, diet, exercise, social connection - do you need the most help with? What's the smallest step you could take today in order to improve in that area?"

"Judge a man by his questions, rather than by his answers."

"The path to success is to take massive, determined action.”