This 4 Part Framework Will Help You Take Back Control of Time
Spend time on what matters to you the most.
In the modern world, we all got an endless list of stuff that we could be doing. If we want to make time for the most important stuff, the stuff that matters. We can’t just do it by spinning our gears faster and faster.
Instead, we need a more holistic approach, to our daily routines, priorities, and lives.
And today we’re talking about Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky. The authors both worked at Google. They spent their careers creating products like Gmail, YouTube, and Hangouts.
So they got a unique insight into why these services are so compelling and how to prevent them from taking them over our lives.
Make Time is a productivity book, but it presents a four-part framework, for how we can focus on the things that matter most to us. And top of that, between these four bits of the framework, we got 87 different tactics in the book.
But before we get to the framework and the tactics, let’s start with an important question?
Why is life so busy?
Two main things contribute to this, but the main ones are:-
- The Busy Bandwagon
- The Infinity Pools
The Busy Bandwagon
The busy bandwagon is the idea that if you’re busy all the time, you’re spending your time efficiently. We all, and I’m guilty of this as well. We try to squeeze productivity into every moment of our day. And at least for me, even if I’m taking a break, I feel a little bit guilty that I’m not doing something quite useful with that time.
In a way, it’s this constant fear that if I slow down, I’m gonna fall behind. And even when we have so much to be grateful for. At least for me, there’s still this fear that’s it’s all gonna come crashing down unless I go a hundred miles per hour.
Then we got Infinity Pools.
The Infinity Pools
The author describes this part as
The infinity pools are the apps and the services, websites whatever, anything in our life that has sort of an infinity supply of content that is always refreshing.
There’s always more water in the pool. You can jump back in at any time. We call this a distraction kryptonite in the book.
Just as kryptonite renders superman powerless, whatever app or service it is, it makes us powerless to resist.
The busy bandwagon defaults us to endless tasks, the infinity pools points us to endless distraction.
Now. We’ve identified the problems, The busy bandwagon, and the infinity pools. But the issue is that without a proper framework, for dealing with this, we tend to rely on willpower.
The author further stated on the part of dealing with the infinity pools is that
The philosophy with making that products was because of user’s habitual actions, they’re not things where you’re actively deciding to go and spend time on that, service or app, but you’re doing it out of habit that you can’t rely on willpower to counteract that force.
So what we need is a system that we can build on productive habits around. And that is where the four-part framework comes in.
Make Time is based on a simple structure of four steps repeated every day,
- Highlight
- Laser
- Energize
- Reflect
Highlight
The first step is deciding on which stuff you want to make time for and that involves figuring out what is our daily highlight. The highlight hypothesis is that if you set a single intention at the start of each day, we predict you’ll be more satisfied, joyful, and effective.
The idea of a daily highlight is that each day we’ll choose a single activity that we’ll prioritize and protect in our calendar.
As the authors stated in the book,
Focusing on a daily highlight stops the tug of war between infinity pools distraction and demand of busy bandwagon.
It reveals a third path being intentional and focused about how you spend your time.
Since reading this book a few months ago, every single day, I now set myself a daily highlight. And that’s the thing I have to get it done. And even though I got a load of other things or my to-do list, I just always make sure that is the one thing that I always do.
The next step is, how do we pick our highlight each day?
It can be literally whatever you want, but if you’re struggling to pick a daily highlight, you can think of it in one of the three ways,
1. Urgency
2. Satisfaction
3. Joy
The point is as long as we set a focus for the day, that allows us to make the time for it. And in the book, they’ve got seven different tactics to figure out what the daily highlight is, and then they’ve got a load of different methods for making the time for the highlight.
The one that I use is that each morning, whether I’m doing a daily check-in on Notion, or writing it down on my journal, I would just write a little H and that will be my highlight of the day.
Now that we have picked our daily highlight, step number two in the framework is Laser.
Laser
The laser hypothesis is that if you create barriers around the busy bandwagon and the infinity pools, we predict that you’ll focus your attention like a laser beam.
And this is all about defense. It is How do I manage my attention? , How do I avoid getting sucked into all the other stuff that’s going on in the world so that I can be focused on the thing that matters.
And here’s another nice quote from the book,
When distraction is hard to access, you don’t have to worry about willpower.
You can channel your energy into making time instead of wasting it.
The point is, because we know we’re gonna get distracted by devices, the instant gratification of the infinity pools, we need to ramp up the friction so that it physically makes it harder to use the things.
The third part of the process is Energize.
Energize
And the energize hypothesis is that if you live a little more like a prehistoric human, we predict you’ll enhance your mental and physical energy.
It’s all about the simple ways that you can take care of yourself so that you have the energy for that stuff you care about. This stuff is really important. And I know I don’t pay as much attention to it as I should.
If you just focus on sleeping on time, eating well, drinking lots of water, and exercising, that would probably do more to boost your productivity. And I’ve learned quite a lot of facts about sleep, exercise, and caffeine from reading “Make Time”.
The first thing I do in the morning would be to drink a cup of coffee to wake myself up. But in the book, they say that is that our body has natural cortisol that wakes us up about an hour after we get out of bed. And after then we should let the caffeine kick in at that point because that keeps us awake for longer, and it also means we’re not interfering with our body’s cortisol mechanisms.
And finally, all three steps would be kind of pointless if we didn’t then reflect on what we’re doing to see if it makes a difference in our day.
Reflect
The author mentions in the book,
Fourth step is the most important because it’s the one that I think is oftentimes missing and it’s reflect. And it’s all about looking back every day and taking notes on what worked for you. This is the do it yourself, adjust and adapt part of philosophy comes in.
Step four is all about reflecting on our day and at the end of the book, they got the sample template that we can use to base our daily reflection on.
And so my daily reflection that I do at the end of each day on Notion, I’ve built a Notion template using input from “Make Time”.
Final Thoughts
As Lord Chesterfield once said:
“I recommend you to take care of the minutes, for the hours will take care of themselves.”
The most important thing among all the content mentioned is that you need to find a way to establish your system. You need to get in routine and habit of experimenting and trying things and believe that your time and your attention and your energy are yours to design and to experiment with.
And you need to do that because you can’t just do what somebody else says to do it. You can’t like, read a book and follow the steps and your life will be perfect. You’ve to take ownership of that, make your time your own, experiment with it, and figure out what works for you.
If you find this helpful, below are my posts about where I wrote about insights from popular nonfiction books.