# Make Time  ## Summary ### 🚀 The Summary in One Sentence 1. Make Time is **about creating space in your life** for what truly matters using highlights, laser-style focus, energizing breaks, and regularly reflecting on how you spend your most valuable asset ### ☘️ Lessons I Will Apply in Real Life _(what concrete actions will I take after reading this?)_ - Making the week's agenda based on highlights - Use Apple Focus when working - Recharge myself with whatever I can - Take notes before bed ### 📒 Summary + Notes #### Point 1: **Highlight** - **Start each day by choosing a priority** Asking yourself “_What’s going to be the highlight of my day?_” ensures that you spend time on what matters most to you and don’t lose the entire day reacting to other people’s priorities. #### Point 2: **Laser** - **Beat distractions to make time** Distractions like email, social media, and breaking news are everywhere. We’ll show you how to adjust your devices and apps so you can find Laser mode. #### Point 3: **Energise** - **Use the body to recharge the brain** The lifestyle defaults of the 21st Century ignore our evolutionary history and rob us of energy, but with a few small changes, you can reset those defaults and power up. #### Point 4: **Reflect** - **Adjust and improve your system** Finally, before going to bed, you’ll take a few notes. It’s super simple: You’ll decide which tactics you want to continue and which ones you want to refine or drop. ## Blinkist ### 🧐What’s in it for me? - Reclaim my time from busyness and distractions to do the things I really care about. ### 💡In this Blink I’ll learn: - the identities and hidden nature of the dynamic duo of time-wasting super-villains: the Busy Bandwagon and the Infinity Pool; - why striving to be more productive can make you feel like you’re just running faster on a hamster wheel; - a nifty trick for avoiding caffeine crashes. ### 👀 Other viewpoints / Further reading ### 📒 Blink Notes #### Blink 1 - We lose our time to busyness and distractions. How do we escape? Well, that’s what the rest of these blinks are all about! First, we’ll look at what not to do. Then, we’ll look at what to do. #### Blink 2 - By itself, productivity just leads to more busyness. Exhausted by running on the hamster wheel of productivity, making no further progress toward your true callings, you’ll be especially prone to falling into the Infinity Pools of distraction. #### Blink 3 - Willpower alone cannot save us from distractions. The combination of expertly-designed apps and prehistorically-shaped minds is too powerful for us to resist by willpower alone. We need strategies and tactics. #### Blink 4 - To overcome busyness and distractions, you need to change the default settings of your behavior. Riding the Busy Bandwagon and wallowing in Infinity Pools has become our **automatic** behavioral reactions to professional demands and digital technologies. If the problem with our default settings is unmindful reactivity, then its antidote is the opposite: mindful proactivity. #### Blink 5 - To change your default settings, you need tactics and a strategy to create barriers between you and your time wasters. The strategy that comes next will enable you to find the set of tactics that works for you. In its broad outlines, this strategy is very simple and can be broken down into four steps: - Highlight - Focus - Energise - Reflect #### Blink 6 - Focus on the present by choosing an activity or project that will be the **highlight** of your day. There is a sweet spot between your short-term and long-term goals: A goal that you can focus on today but that can also serve as your guiding star as you navigate it. This is a daily highlight – a sustained activity or project that you’ll be able to look back on with satisfaction at the end of the day. #### Blink 7 - Choose an important, satisfying or joyful **highlight** that can be accomplished in 60 to 90 minutes. Highlights come in three basic flavours: _important_, _meaningful_ and _joyful_. Each entails its own approach, so let’s go through them one-by-one. - For the first approach, ask yourself, “what – if anything – is my most urgent, absolutely necessary activity or project today?” To find these highlights, take a look at your to-do list, your email inbox or your calendar. Now, let’s say you need to fill out a ten-minute form today. By all means, finish the form – but don’t make it your highlight! For a highlight, you want something that takes about 60 to 90 minutes. Shorter activities don’t give you enough time to get in the zone. For longer ones, you’re unlikely to be able to sustain your focus. - For the second approach, ask yourself, “what’ll make me feel the most satisfied at the end of the day?” This is purely about what you want to do, not what you need to do. Prime candidates for this type of highlight are projects you’ve been wanting to get around to, but keep postponing because they aren’t time sensitive. You’ll usually get this satisfaction from something that is either an outlet for a skill you want to use, or accomplishes something that’s important to you. - The third approach is to ask yourself, “what will bring me the most joy?” The point of becoming less unmindfully reactive and more mindfully proactive isn’t to construct some sort of perfectly planned day with a goal-obsessed mentality, it’s to live a fuller and more joyful life. To live that life, sometimes you just need to let loose and do something simply because you enjoy doing it. #### Blink 8 - Try out tactics to help you choose your highlights. Don’t try doing all of the following tactics at once. See which ones do and don’t work for you then keep the ones that work and get rid of the rest. - As a first tactic for finding your highlight, you can write down a list of your priorities and then rank them to remind yourself of which one is your highest priority. Ask yourself, “how can I pursue this today?” If you’re torn between two potential highlights, you can use your ranked list to break the tie. - As a second tactic, you can repeat yesterday's highlight if you didn't get to it, didn't finish it, want to establish a new skill or habit or simply enjoyed it so much that you want to do it again! - Third, you can combine a bunch of little, nagging tasks into a one big, composite task. There’s a two-fold bonus to this tactic. First, it gives you the satisfaction of feeling caught up with tasks that have been weighing on you. Second, by giving you the confidence that you’ll get around to them someday, these non-urgent tasks can pile up without constantly vying for your attention, thus putting the breaks on the Busy Bandwagon. - As another tactic, you can look at your to-do list, and do the task that matters most to you. - Finally, you can choose a highlight that's a longer project, break it into steps and string those steps into a multi-day highlight. #### Blink 9 - Use tactics to help you make time for your highlights: - You can estimate how long your highlight will take to accomplish and schedule it into your day. - Or, go one step further and block off a regular space of time on your schedule for doing highlights. - Or, go two steps further and break down your day into a detailed schedule – perhaps even half hour by half hour, writing in simple things like “drink coffee.” This may allow you to get as much time out of your day as you can – just you make sure you write in your highlight and not just your tasks! - Alternatively, if you can, shift around your commitments or get out of them to make space in your schedule. If you shift around some meetings, you might regain a surprising amount of time. - Finally, to reclaim time for yourself at the beginning or end of each day, you could either become a morning person or a more effective night person. That means someone who doesn’t just start puttering around on Facebook or YouTube when the hour gets late. #### Blink 10 - Use tactics to avoid distractions and stay focused on your highlights. - First, you can delete Infinity Pool cellphone apps like Twitter and Facebook. Don’t worry, you’ll still have access to your maps, music and the other useful apps. - For more extreme measures, you can even delete your phone’s email app. This might sound crazy, but think about it: How often do you actually write an email reply on your phone, with its tiny, cumbersome keyboard? - Alternatively, install software and website blocking programs to limit the amount of time you can use social media or email on your computer. - Log out of your social media accounts. That way, when you feel the impulse to check them, you’ll have to enter your login credentials. The extra little hassle will discourage you from using social media unnecessarily. - Also, instead of keeping up with the news on a daily or even hourly basis, you can catch up on it once per week. - Moreover, when you have a random, fleeting question, write it down on a piece of paper and save it for later, instead of immediately Googling it. #### Blink 11 - Take care of your body to keep your mind energised. - Fortunately, most of the things you need to know are pretty simple and come straight from human prehistory. Looking at the lifestyles of our ancestors, you see some simple but important factors behind their healthiness: a varied and sparse diet, a sleeping schedule that mirrors the rhythm of the day, plenty of social interaction and nearly constant low-key movement like walking, punctuated by bursts of more intense activity like lifting heavy objects. - The key to taking care of your body is to return to the principles underlying our ancestors’ way of life while retaining the benefits of modern life. This isn’t about adopting an extreme paleo diet or anything like that, but about making your evolutionarily-shaped needs more in sync with your societally-shaped lifestyles. #### Blink 12 - Use tactics to energise your mind and body. - The tactics for taking care of our minds and bodies can be broken down into four categories: exercise, diet, social connection and sleep. We’ll look at one or two tactics for each of these. - For exercise, remember that we don’t need to do a triathlon or anything extreme like that. Just 20 minutes of modest, daily activity, such as running or swimming, is scientifically proven to have important benefits for our cognitive abilities, mood and overall health. And if we’re really short on time, we don’t even need 20 minutes. Recent research suggests that we can experience even greater benefits from seven minutes of high-intensity interval training than from an hour of gentle exercise. In as little as 5 to 10 minutes, we can squeeze in quite a re-energising workout by combining sprints, push-ups, pull-ups, squats and lifting weights. - Regarding diet, eat real food in moderation, like our ancestors did: plants, nuts, fish and meat. Here’s a simple trick for making serving sizes smaller without feeling smaller: put salad on your plate first, right in the middle. Then add the rest of the meal around it. This way, the whole plate will be filled up, but mostly with greens. Also, caffeine crashes can be devastating to our energy levels. To avoid them, try re-caffeinating about 30 minutes before a crash, which is often after lunch. If we wait until we’ve already crashed, it’s too late. The biochemical principles at play here are a little complicated, but the bottom line is that we have to reinforce the old caffeine with new caffeine before an army of drowsiness-inducing molecules called adenosine can sweep in and win the battle over the brain. - For sleep, avoid the temptation to catch up on it. This messes up our internal clock, which disrupts our sleep schedule. Stick to it. Wake up at the same time every day – even weekends. - For social connection, remember that like our prehistoric ancestors, who lived in small, tight-knit tribes, we have an innate need to socialise. In today’s world, our “tribe” is our friends, colleagues and extended family. Hanging out with any of these people can help fulfil our need for connection – but some of them are especially good at lifting our spirits. Spend time with these people in particular. #### Blink 13 - Reflect on the results of trying out these tactics. - In total, these blinks have given you 20 tactics for implementing the first three steps of the Make Time strategy: highlight, focus and energise. That’s a lot of tactics to try out! With so many tactics to choose from, you might feel overwhelmed. Even if you remember the advice about just trying out one new tactic at a time, it might still feel like there’s so much you’re not covering. Here’s one way of fighting that feeling. Think of the tactics as recipes in a cookbook, and the first three steps of the strategy as breakfast, lunch and dinner. Each day, you try out just one recipe per meal, at most. You wouldn’t feel compelled to cook your way through an entire cookbook, and you shouldn’t feel that way about these tactics either! The point of a cookbook is just to give you options to try. You pick and choose the ones that fit your needs. You test them, taste the results and go from there. The same holds true of the “recipes” provided by these tactics. The point is simply to see which ones work for you – so test them out and then observe, record and analyze the results. To do this, simply take a few moments every day to note what your highlight was, whether you made time for it, which tactics you used, what worked and didn’t work about them, what changes you could make and which tactics you’ll use tomorrow. This is the last step of the Make Time strategy. To further keep track of how you’re doing, you can also rate your focus and energy levels on a scale of 1 to 10. And to add a positive spirit to the whole endeavor, you can write down a moment for which you feel grateful. That way, you’ll be attuned to the positive developments that you may see in your life. If all goes well, these developments will be considerable. They’ll give you more time, energy and focus for the activities, projects and people you really care about. By freeing yourself up to pursue them, you may even rediscover an old passion or discover a new one. Perhaps you may pursue your career with renewed vigor. Or perhaps one of your projects or hobbies will blossom into a brand new calling. ### 📋Final Summary: - The main reasons we feel like we never have enough time are the Busy Bandwagon and Infinity Pools: the ethos that encourages busyness for its own sake and the apps that keep us distracted with endless communication and entertainment. Productivity and willpower alone are not enough to overcome these two forces of time wastage. Instead, we need a mindful, proactive strategy to deal with them. To that end, you can use a variety of tactics to implement a four-step strategy of choosing a daily highlight, focusing on it, energizing yourself, and reflecting on the results. ### ☘️ Lessons I will Apply in Real Life - I’ll Review these blinks, select one tactic for each of the first three steps and start choosing a highlight, focusing on it, and energizing myself today!