Make Time

Do you ever look back at your day and wonder where the time went? That feeling—of days blurring together in a rush of to-dos, notifications, and meetings—is exactly what Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky set out to fix in Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day. Drawing from their experiences designing products like Gmail and YouTube, they contend that modern life is designed to pull your attention in a thousand directions. Our technology and workplace norms encourage constant busyness, distraction, and reactivity. In short, our default settings are broken. But, they argue, by redesigning your defaults—your calendar, your devices, your routines—you can make time instead of losing it.

Knapp and Zeratsky’s central claim is that time isn’t something you save; it’s something you make—through deliberate attention, focus, and energy choices. Their framework integrates decades of design thinking and real-world experiments into a four-step daily loop: Highlight (choose what matters today), Laser (focus your attention), Energize (build energy through physical well-being), and Reflect (adjust and improve through daily feedback). This isn’t a productivity manual for squeezing more hours out of your day. It’s a guide for designing your days around meaning, satisfaction, and control.

Unlearning the Busy Bandwagon and Infinity Pools

Knapp and Zeratsky frame modern life as dominated by two forces: the Busy Bandwagon—our tendency to fill every moment with busyness—and the Infinity Pools—apps and services that deliver endless streams of content. The Busy Bandwagon rewards constant motion but rarely meaningful progress, while Infinity Pools keep us perpetually distracted with notifications and novelty. The result is burnout and blur: we’re always doing, but rarely noticing what we’ve done.

Their antidote? Design your time the way great designers build products—by questioning every default. Why must meetings be 60 minutes? Why should you check email first thing in the morning? Why keep social media apps on your phone at all? By applying design principles to everyday life, Knapp and Zeratsky believe you can turn your attention into an intentional, renewable resource rather than a reactive one.

The Four-Step Loop for Intentional Days

The heart of the book lies in its four-step daily system, inspired by the design sprints the authors led at Google Ventures. Each step addresses a different dimension of human experience—focus, attention, energy, and reflection:

• Highlight: Pick one meaningful task or experience to be the “bright spot” in your day. It could be finishing a project, taking your kid to the park, or baking a cake. The goal isn’t volume; it’s satisfaction.
• Laser: Develop intense, deliberate focus by redesigning your environment to minimize distraction. That may mean deleting apps, logging out, blocking sites, or even wearing a watch to avoid checking your phone.
• Energize: Recognize that your mind is powered by your body. Move daily, eat well, rest deeply, and spend time with your “tribe.” The authors borrow lessons from evolutionary psychology to restore our natural energy rhythms.
• Reflect: End each day by taking brief notes on what worked—your energy, focus, and gratitude—and tweak tomorrow based on today’s results. Like a scientist, you continually adjust your system.

Together, these four steps form a sustainable feedback loop—a daily design sprint for your own life. Rather than chasing a perfect system or single hack, Make Time encourages ongoing experimentation. If you fall off the wagon, you simply start again tomorrow. This adaptability makes it powerful: each day is a clean slate.

Why Energy Matters More Than Willpower

Unlike many time-management systems, Make Time emphasizes that attention depends on physiology, not heroism. You can’t force focus when your energy is depleted. To sustain attention, you need to live like a “modern hunter-gatherer”: move often, eat real food, and rest deeply. This “Energize” philosophy stands out for its practicality and humanity—it’s permission to work with, not against, your biology.

A Framework, Not a Formula

Knapp and Zeratsky make it clear that Make Time isn’t about perfection. They’re refreshingly open about failing to follow their own methods all the time. Instead of rigid scheduling, they offer a menu of 87 tactics you can mix and match to fit your lifestyle. Like a cookbook, it invites play and personalization. The mantra is “Pick, Test, Repeat.”

Compared with Cal Newport’s more austere Deep Work or David Allen’s comprehensive Getting Things Done, Make Time is minimalist, humorous, and humane. It’s not about optimizing your every minute—it’s about ensuring that some minutes each day actually matter to you. The result is a quietly radical idea: that meaning, not metrics, should be your measure of productivity.

“Most of us don’t need more time; we need more focus. When you choose one meaningful thing each day, time expands around it.”

Through patient reflection and small daily wins, Make Time helps you turn your life’s autopilot off. It teaches you to question the defaults that govern your attention, redesign them for intentional living, and build momentum one Highlight at a time. It’s not about doing more; it’s about remembering what you’re alive to do.

At the heart of Make Time is the deceptively simple practice of choosing a daily Highlight—the one thing that will make your day feel meaningful. John Zeratsky came to this after an unsettling realization: he couldn’t remember two full months of his life. Time had blurred because he was constantly busy yet rarely engaged. That’s when he discovered that satisfaction doesn’t come from long-term goals or exhaustive to-do lists but from what he calls “in-between activities”—tasks big enough to matter but small enough to finish within a day.

Filling the Space Between Goals and Tasks

Most people vacillate between two unfulfilling modes: obsessing over distant five-year goals or drowning in micro-tasks. Zeratsky discovered a missing middle—the Highlight. It might be finishing a report, cooking with your kids, or taking a walk with a friend. Picking one focus doesn’t mean ignoring everything else; it simply gives your day a purposeful anchor.

You choose your Highlight by asking, “At the end of today, what do I most want to remember?” The answer provides a built-in compass for how to spend your time when distractions tempt you.

Three Ways to Pick a Highlight

• Urgency: What’s the most pressing item that must get done? Maybe you owe someone an important proposal or have a deadline tomorrow.
• Satisfaction: Which task will leave you with the greatest sense of accomplishment, even if it’s not urgent? This could be finishing a creative project or reorganizing your workspace.
• Joy: What activity would make today delightful? Maybe it’s meeting a friend or working on your novel. Knapp and Zeratsky argue that joy is as legitimate a priority as productivity.

Once you’ve chosen, the authors suggest giving your Highlight a physical presence: write it down. A sticky note, a calendar entry, or a note on your fridge acts as a daily contract with yourself. The goal isn’t to optimize every hour but to ensure at least one hour—ideally 60 to 90 minutes—is spent with full attention on something that matters to you.

Tools and Tactics for Making It Happen

The book offers seven practical tactics to help you choose and protect your Highlight. These include “Groundhog It” (repeat yesterday’s highlight if it worked), “Stack Rank Your Life” (prioritize big categories), “Batch the Little Stuff” (tackle chores in one go), and “Run a Personal Sprint” (focus on the same project several days in a row). These are design experiments—ways to test how your attention behaves over time.

Jake Knapp notes that life rarely unfolds as planned. After a day full of interruptions—from plumbing problems to headaches—he once scrapped his planned writing goal and instead chose to make that night’s dinner with friends his new Highlight. The outcome? He salvaged the day emotionally and broke the cycle of frustration. The flexibility to rechoose your Highlight midstream can transform chaos into compassion toward yourself.

“A Highlight isn’t about squeezing more tasks into your day,” Knapp and Zeratsky remind us. “It’s about finding the one that deserves your best energy.”

By choosing a single daily Highlight, you shift from reacting to designing. Over time, this habit creates momentum toward bigger goals without the burnout of constant busyness. It’s a high-leverage move: a small daily decision that expands the meaning of your entire week.

Modern life is engineered to scatter your attention. The authors call these distraction traps “Infinity Pools”—places like YouTube, Instagram, and email that offer endless content and instant gratification. Having helped build Gmail and YouTube, Knapp and Zeratsky confess their complicity: they knew how to make you come back again and again. But now they reveal how you can fight back by restoring friction, not willpower. Instead of resisting temptation endlessly, you design your environment to make distraction harder to access. That’s Laser mode.

Distraction Isn’t Your Fault

The authors explain how tech companies exploit human instincts—curiosity, social belonging, and reward anticipation. These have ancient roots: our “caveman brains” are wired for novelty because noticing movement in the grass once meant survival. In the digital age, that same reflex drives us to check pings and refresh feeds. You don’t lack discipline; you’re outmatched by design. Thus, instead of moralizing about phone use, the authors recommend changing the default environment, not yourself.

Small Frictions, Big Freedom

Their “Laser” tactics form a toolkit for regaining focus. The philosophy is simple: make distractions inconvenient. Delete or log out of apps, clear your homescreen, wear a watch so you don’t open your phone for the time, and even physically relocate your devices when you want to focus. These small acts rebuild intentionality.

• Try a Distraction-Free Phone: Remove social media, email, and browsers. Keep only apps that serve you—maps, camera, or music. Many readers found this recovered 2–3 hours a day.
• Block Distraction Kryptonite: Identify your personal weakness—Twitter, online shopping, sports news—and create barriers, from digital timers to full unavailability.
• Skip the Morning Check-In: Resist checking the news or email immediately upon waking. Preserve mornings for intentional work or rest.

Email and the Myth of Productivity

The authors reveal email as one of the most deceptive Infinity Pools. It masquerades as work but steals focus, creating a loop of “fake wins.” Instead, they advise “Slow Your Inbox” using concrete boundaries: check email at the end of the day, respond slowly, and reset expectations with colleagues. If you must stay reachable, consider “send-only” email or auto-replies that protect your time. Their colleague at Google Ventures once declared, “Urgency is rarely urgent.” This mindset reframes every digital interaction.

Reclaiming Laser Mode

Laser mode isn’t cold asceticism; it’s flow. You enter deep engagement not through force but by removing interference. When you finish your Highlight without interruption, you experience satisfaction and calm—the real “dopamine hit.” The book’s practical blend of behavioral psychology and design-thinking echoes Cal Newport’s Deep Work but with a gentler approach rooted in environmental redesign rather than self-denial.

“You can’t rely on willpower to overcome distraction,” the authors insist. “You have to make it easier to focus than not to.”

By default, distraction wins. But when you add barriers and boundaries, attention becomes an effortless state. Laser mode isn’t about rigidity—it’s about freedom: the freedom to give your best energy to what matters most.

You can’t focus if your brain is running on fumes. That’s why Knapp and Zeratsky dedicate a full quarter of the book to Energize—a set of tactics for boosting mental power through physical well-being. Their thesis is clear: your brain is not separate from your body. When you live like modern humans—sitting all day, eating sugar-laden foods, sleeping poorly—you starve your brain of the energy it needs to focus. To replace exhaustion with vitality, they look backward—to our hunter-gatherer ancestors—and forward to mindful living practices.

Lessons from Urk the Caveman

In one of the book’s most entertaining passages, the authors introduce “Urk,” a hypothetical Stone Age human who embodies natural wellness: he moves constantly, eats real food, sleeps deeply, and connects with his tribe. Though the differences between modern offices and the savanna are stark, our biology hasn’t evolved nearly as fast. “We’re built for one world,” they write, “but we live in another.”

They distill six energizing principles from this evolutionary view: Keep moving, eat real food, optimize caffeine, go off the grid, make it personal, and sleep in a cave. Together, these habits restore what life’s conveniences have stolen—rhythm, rest, and renewal.

Movement as Fuel

Instead of grueling workouts, they prescribe small daily movement: “Exercise every day—but don’t be a hero.” Research shows twenty minutes is enough to lift mood and cognition. Walking, another favorite, is described as a “wonder drug” for your brain. Knapp discovered that walking to work didn’t just improve fitness; it gave him time to think and plan his Highlight. Movement, they say, is the easiest way to manufacture energy from scratch.

Eat Like a Hunter-Gatherer

Following Michael Pollan’s timeless advice (“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”), the authors advocate ditching processed “fake” foods in favor of whole ingredients. A practical visual—“Central Park Your Plate”—suggests making vegetables the dominant centerpiece, just like New York’s Central Park surrounded by buildings. They present two contrasting but equally effective tactics: JZ’s “Stay Hungry” approach (occasional fasting) and Jake’s “Snack Like a Toddler” (healthy snacks for steady energy). Whether fasting or grazing, the key is awareness, not rigidity.

Optimize Caffeine and Quiet

Their science-backed caffeine tips are refreshingly nuanced. Wait until 9:30 a.m. for that first cup (when cortisol dips), take “caffeine naps,” and avoid caffeine after 2:30 p.m. to protect sleep. Beyond beverages, “going off the grid” becomes another source of energy: step outside, leave your phone, stare at trees. The Japanese call it shinrin-yoku—“forest bathing.” These pauses act as brain reboots, recharging attention for later.

Connection and Rest

Humans are social animals, and one of the book’s high-energy hacks is analog: “Spend time with your tribe.” Sharing meals without screens fuels both mood and focus. For rest, they recommend sleeping “in a cave”—a metaphor for dark, cool, tech-free bedrooms. “Fake the sunset” by reducing light and screens before bedtime; your circadian rhythm will thank you.

“You can’t outthink a tired body,” they warn. “The foundation of focus is energy.”

By merging ancestral wisdom with modern constraints, Knapp and Zeratsky craft an energy philosophy that’s forgiving and flexible. You don’t need perfection—just tiny physical acts that empower mental clarity. When your body thrives, focus follows naturally.

The final step in the Make Time loop is Reflect—the daily habit that turns this method from a set of ideas into a living system. Knapp and Zeratsky liken it to running your own personal laboratory. Every day, you record simple observations about what worked, what drained you, and what you’re grateful for. Over time, these notes form a feedback loop that fine-tunes your behavior almost automatically. It’s science in service of self-awareness.

Observe, Guess, Experiment, Measure

Using the classic scientific method—observe, hypothesize, test, measure—the authors show how even tiny daily data points can drive better choices. Did you feel tired after skipping your morning walk? Did writing down your Highlight improve your satisfaction? By turning your day into an experiment, you transform mistakes into neutral data. It’s no longer “I failed to focus” but rather “That tactic didn’t work for me today.”

Knapp reveals that this approach emerged from his own spreadsheets tracking energy levels. By correlating patterns—dessert after lunch lowered his afternoon energy; morning exercise increased it—he created a self-tuned system more meaningful than generic advice. Over years, “science-ing” their lives gave both authors durable insight into how their brains and bodies truly functioned.

Gratitude as a Feedback Tool

Each nightly reflection includes one deceptively simple question: “What am I grateful for today?” This is not just feel-good fluff. As they note, ancient philosophies from Stoicism to Buddhism—and modern psychology—agree that gratitude recalibrates attention toward the positive. By ending on gratitude, you “bias the data” in your favor, ensuring the Make Time system stays motivating even when life feels chaotic.

Iterating Your Life Design

You don’t need perfection, the authors remind; you only need curiosity. Each failure generates insight. Didn’t make time for your Highlight? Maybe you scheduled it during your energy slump. Felt unfocused? Perhaps caffeine timing needs tweaking. Over time, these micro-adjustments yield compounding results. Reflecting is how small shifts create big outcomes—what they call the “invisible premise” of Make Time. You’re already close; you just need to notice what works.

From Awareness to Transformation

In practice, reflection only takes five minutes: jot down your Highlight, energy level, tactics used, what worked, and what didn’t. But those notes become a mirror of your evolving priorities. They show, as Knapp discovered, that “each day is a clean slate.” The act of noticing is itself transformative—aligning daily choices with long-term purpose. Over weeks, your life begins to tell a story of intention rather than reaction.

“You are a sample size of one,” they conclude. “Your data is the only data that matters.”

By closing each day with reflection, you transform Make Time from a one-off system into an adaptive lifestyle. The result is mindfulness grounded in evidence: your own life becomes the experiment that teaches you how to live it better.