Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day

Every time you check your email or another message service, you’re basically saying, “Does any random person need my time right now?

something magic happens when you start the day with one high-priority goal.

Perfection is a distraction—another shiny object taking your attention away from your real priorities.

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

Believe in your Highlight: It is worth prioritizing over random disruption.

Every mistake [is] just a data point.

When distraction is hard to access, you don’t have to worry about willpower.

Every distraction imposes a cost on the depth of your focus. When your brain changes contexts—say, going from painting a picture to answering a text and then back to painting again—there’s a switching cost. Your brain has to load a different set of rules and information into working memory. This “boot up” costs at least a few minutes, and for complex tasks, it can take even longer. The two of us have found it can take a couple of hours of uninterrupted writing before we’re doing our best work; sometimes it even requires several consecutive days before we’re in the zone.

We do not remember days, we remember moments. —CESARE PAVESE

Combine the four-plus hours the average person spends on their smartphone with the four-plus hours the average person spends watching television, and distraction is a full-time job.

We’re the descendants of those ancient humans, but our species hasn’t evolved nearly as fast as the world around us has. That means we’re still wired for a lifestyle of constant movement, varied but relatively sparse diets, ample quiet, plenty of face-to-face time, and restful sleep that’s aligned with the rhythm of the day.

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.

You know the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest …. The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness. —BROTHER DAVID STEINDL-RAST

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.

If you change your priorities, people will notice. Your actions show others what’s important to you. When your friends, your coworkers, and your kids and family see you being intentional with your time, you’ll give them permission to question their own “always on” default and step away from their own Infinity Pools.

That is, one new tactic to help you make time for your Highlight, one that keeps you laser-focused by changing how you react to distractions, and one for building energy—three tactics total.

Make Time is a framework for choosing what you want to focus on, building the energy to do it, and breaking the default cycle so that you can start being more intentional about the way you live your life. Even if you don’t completely control your own schedule—and few of us do—you absolutely can control your attention.

Sixty to ninety minutes is a sweet spot. It’s enough time to do something meaningful, and it’s a reasonable amount of time to create in your schedule.

change comes from resetting defaults, creating barriers, and beginning to design the way you spend your time.

Most of Our Time Is Spent by Default Both forces—the Busy Bandwagon and the Infinity Pools—are powerful because they’ve become our defaults.

Michael Pollan, a food enthusiast and author. In his bestselling book In Defense of Food, Pollan addressed the “supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy”: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

You know the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest….The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness. —BROTHER DAVID STEINDL-RAST

A 2014 study by the University of British Columbia found that when people checked their email just three times a day (instead of as often as they wanted), they reported remarkably lower stress.

Stare at the blank screen, or switch to paper, or walk around, but keep your focus on the project at hand.

Have you ever spent hours churning through email and attending meetings only to realize at the end of the day that you failed to make time for the one thing you really needed to do? Well, we have. Lots of times. And whenever it happens, we feel miserable. Oh, the regret!

it’s helpful to remember that Homo sapiens evolved to be hunter-gatherers, not screen tappers and pencil pushers.

When you don’t take care of your body, your brain can’t do its job. If you’ve ever felt sluggish and uninspired after a big lunch or invigorated and clearheaded after exercising, you know what we mean. If you want energy for your brain, you need to take care of your body.

In our design sprints, we found that if we ended each workday before people were exhausted, the week’s productivity increased dramatically. Even shortening the day by thirty minutes made a big difference.

All of a sudden I’d realize I was working toward a goal that no longer mattered to me. And living a “someday” life was demoralizing. In the words of author James Clear, I was essentially saying, “I’m not good enough yet, but I will be when I reach my goal.

Although some of our tactics turned into habits, others sputtered and failed. But taking stock of our results each day helped us understand why we tripped up. And this experimental approach also allowed us to be kinder to ourselves when we made mistakes—after all, every mistake was just a data point, and we could always try again tomorrow.