- In the modern world, we've all got an endless list of stuff that we could be doing. The more we get done,
the more we have to do, if we wanna make time for
the most important stuff, the stuff that actually 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. Hey friends, welcome back to the channel into the third episode of Book Club, the series where I
summarize the key insights and ideas from some of my favorite books. And today we're talking about "Make Time" by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, "How to Focus on what Matters Every Day." Jake and John, both
used to work at Google. They spent their careers
designing products like Gmail, YouTube, and Google Hangouts. So they've got a unique
insight into why these services are so compelling and how to prevent them from taking over our lives. "Make Time" is a sort
of productivity book, but it presents this four-part framework for how we can focus on the
things that matter most to us. And on top of that,
between these four bits of the framework, we've got 87
different tactics in the book and kind of one of the
main premises is that it's not a very kind of
prescriptive productivity book. It's more a case of recognizing that there's no-one-size-fits-all
approach to productivity. And so the point is that
you have a look through, you understand the framework
and then you sort of pick and choose the tactics that work for you. But before we get to the
framework and the tactics, let's start with an important question and that is, why is life so busy? So there's two main things
that contribute to this, but the main ones are the busy
bandwagon and infinity pools. The busy bandwagon is
the idea that being busy is somehow a badge of honor. We all, and I'm definitely
guilty of this as well. We try and squeeze productivity into every minute of the 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, like, at least for me,
there's still this fear that it's all gonna come crashing down, unless I keep going at a
hundred miles per hour. Then we've got infinity pools. - So infinity pools are the
apps and services, websites, whatever, anything in
our life that has sort of an infinite supply of content
that is always refreshing. There's always more water in the pool. You can jump back in at any time. We actually call it a kryptonite, distraction kryptonite in the book. You know, we had this
thing that, you know, just as kryptonite renders
Superman powerless, you know, this whatever app it is
and whatever service it is, it sort of makes us powerless to resist. - The busy bandwagon
defaults to endless tasks, the infinity pools defaults
to endless distraction. Okay, so 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. - Our kind of philosophy with that stuff is that because those
become habitual actions, they're not things where
you're actively deciding to go and spend time on that,
that service or that app, but you're doing it out of
habit that you can't rely on willpower to counteract that force. And there's actually a
ton of research on this. So this is not an original observation, but it's habits versus willpower, like the habits are gonna win. - So what we need is a
system that we can build our 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 and reflect. - When we started to
write about this stuff, we wanted it to be not a single recipe, step one, step two, step three,
but more like a cookbook. And so we wanted to have
a lot of different recipes that you could use depending
on what worked for you. What clicked for you. Imagine you get a cookbook and there's a bunch of different stuff and nobody gets a cookbook. And they're like, all
right, page one, you know, first recipe, time to make it,
you know, nobody does that. You kind of flip through it, you find the things that look good to you. And so that's the way
the book is structured. And then we kind of put
this framework around it and we said like, we don't
care which tactics you use, we don't care if you use the tactics that are in the book or other stuff, but we think that if you kind
of think about those tactics, those specific things that you're doing, think if those follow or kind of fit into this four-step framework
you're gonna be successful. - The first step is deciding
what we wanna actually 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 the daily
highlight is that each day we'll choose a single
activity that we'll prioritize and protect in our calendar. The highlight can kind of be anything. It can be finishing off a
piece of work or, you know, doing a workout or even
just going for a walk. It's not the only thing
that we're gonna be doing, but it's the thing that
we wanna definitely make time for that day. As Jake and John say in the book, "focusing on a daily highlight, "stops the tug of war between
infinity pool distractions "and the demands of the 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 for myself a daily highlight. And that's the thing
that I have to get done. And even though I've got
a load of other things on my to-do list, I just always make sure that that is the one thing that I do. The next step is, how do we
pick our highlight each day? And it can literally be whatever you want, but John and Jake say
that if you're struggling to pick a daily highlight, you can think of it in one of three ways, urgency, satisfaction, and joy. The point is as long as we
set a focus for the day, that allows us to kind
of make time for it. And in the book, they've
got seven different tactics for how to figure out what
our daily highlight is, and then they've got a
load of different methods for actually making the
time for that highlight. The one that I use is that each morning, whether I'm doing my
daily check-in on notion, or if I'm writing it
down on a piece of paper, I would just write a little H and that will be my highlight of the day. And then when I'm planning
my day out in my head, I will kind of plan out, okay, I wanna do my daily highlight between two and 4:00 PM today. So now that we've picked
our daily highlight, step number two in the
four-part framework is laser. And the laser hypothesis is
that if you create barriers around the busy bandwagon
and infinity pools, we predict that you'll
focus your attention like a laser beam. - And this is all about defense. So if the first step is offense, you know, what do I wanna make time for? Laser is defense. So it's, 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 stay focused on that thing that matters. And this is where our background
as tech designers really, I think comes in handy
'cause we can share sort of this behind-the-scenes approach of like, okay, this is why this
stuff is distracting. Our philosophy there is to
really kind of understand those mechanisms so that
you can cut them off. You can like break those habit loops so that you don't have to like, you know, clench your fists and like use willpower to like resist checking stuff. It's just not there for you. - And here's another
nice quote from the book. They say that, "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." So the point is, because we know we're gonna
get distracted by devices, you know, the instant gratification
of these infinity pools, we need to ramp up the
friction so that it physically makes it harder to use the things. The book actually has 44
different tactics that we can pick and choose from to manage all
of the various distractions in our lives and to really laser down. Obviously that's way too
many for a YouTube video, but there were a few that
were new to me when I read it a few months ago and that I've actually started using in my life. So we've got 23, skip
the morning check-in, 30, watch out for time
creators, 32, turn distractions into tools, 39, reset expectations, 50, explode your highlight
and 60, go all in. If you wanna find out more
about those then firstly, get a copy of the book,
it's a very good book. But the secondly, John and I
discussed quite a lot of these in depth during our like
two-hour long conversation. If you wanna check it out, the whole two-hour uncut
interview is available on Nebula. And what we started
doing recently as well, is that with all of the
deep dives that I'm doing, we're kind of cutting them
up into bite-sized chunks for a new bite-sized series on Nebula. If for some reason you haven't heard, Nebula is an independent
streaming platform, that me and a bunch of
other creative friends are helping to build. It's not like a competitor to YouTube, but it's a place where
we can put random content like a two-hour interview,
or like, you know, 10 bits of bite-sized or
kind of really niche videos where I talk about my
productivity workflows. To get access to Nebula,
the best ways to sign up to CuriosityStream who are very kindly sponsoring this video. CuriosityStream is the world's leading documentary streaming platform with thousands of documentaries
covering health, finance, nature, history, geography, basically anything you can think of. And the best news is that if
you sign up to CuriosityStream, which is $3 a month, $20 a year, you get free access to Nebula. So you get access to all
of my deep-dive series, the Anchor Interviews, also everything in the bite-sized series, which
are the bite-sized versions. You also get access to my workflow series, which at the moment has 15
videos where I deep dive into some of my favorite
productivity apps. So if that sounds good and
you want access to thousands of documentaries, along
with my exclusive content, along with exclusive content
from people like Tom Scott, Thomas Frank, Wendover Productions, and Legal Eagle then head over
to curiositystream.com/ALI and use the coupon code ALI at checkout. That will give you an email that gives you your Nebula login details
and this is literally the single best deal in streaming. Anyway, going back to the book, the third part of the process is 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. - The third step is a bit
different and it's about energy. And so it's kind of based
on the idea that like, when we're reading about or
thinking about, you know, how we're spending our
time, what we're focused on, we tend to focus on our brains. You know, it's all about the
decisions that we're making and those types of things, but we'd all kind of
experienced this struggle that if your body's not well,
your brain doesn't work, you know, you don't get enough sleep, you drank too much you,
whatever it might be like, you know that feeling
is there but our culture does not encourage us to
think about our bodies and brains as being one system. So that's why step
three energize is there. And it's all about really simple ways that you can take care of
yourself so that you have energy for that stuff that you really care about. - Like this stuff is really important. And I know I don't pay as much
attention to it as I should. Like for me, I love
finding, like discovering a new productivity app that
will change my workflow and make a video about
it and all this stuff. But actually, if I just
focused on sleeping on time, eating well and drinking
lots of water and exercising that would probably do more
to boost my productivity than discovering Roam Research or Notion or whatever fancy new
app is popular this week. And I've actually learned
quite a few things about food, sleep, exercise, and caffeine
from reading "Make Time." Tactic 70 in the list for
example it's pretty cool. Before reading that I'd
wake up in the morning and the first thing I do would
be to drink a cup of coffee to kind of wake myself up. But what they say here is that our body is like natural cortisol
wakes us up about an hour after we first wake up. And so we should then
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 own body's cortisol mechanisms. And tactic 84 for example
is, fake the sunset. And that's this idea that
our bodies are designed to go to sleep when we
see the sun setting. So when it little like it's warm. But the problem is that with
all our devices and stuff, we've got this like blue light
glaring at us at all times. And so after reading that, what I started to do is I switched the Phillips hue light
bulbs in the whole house to have a very sort of warm glow. And I've got these like
blue light blocking glasses that I add to my actual
glasses, a few hours before bed. And that makes everything go yellow, which means I'm kind of
blocking the blue light. And in theory, that should
increase the quality of my sleep or something like that, as ridiculous as they look. And finally, all three of these steps would be kind of pointless
if we didn't then reflect on what we're doing to see if it actually makes a difference to our day. - Fourth step, might actually
be the most important because it's one that I
think is oftentimes missing and it's reflect. And it's all about kind
of looking back every day and taking notes on what worked for you. And so this is where it
kind of this do-it-yourself, sort of adjust and adapt part
of the philosophy comes in. This is kind of the
mechanism for going through all those 87 recipes and
finding the ones that worked, is this idea of this daily reflection. - So step four is all
about reflecting on our day and at the end of the book, they've got the sample template
that we can use to base our own daily reflection off of. 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," and also from my friend Valentine, who did a deep dive with
more of Nebula about that, if you wanna check it out and
also from a fantastic book called "Storyworthy" by Matthew Dicks, that I'm gonna do a book club episode on at some point in the future. So at the end of our deep dive interview, I asked John if he had any parting advice for the people watching. - The most important thing
that I want people to take away from this interview and
from all the work that I do is that you need to find a way
to establish your own system. You need to kind of get in the routine and the habit of experimenting
and trying things and sort of believe that
your time and your attention and your energy are
yours to like to design and to experiment with. And you need to do that because, you know, you can't just do what
somebody else says to do it. You can't just like, you know, read a book and follow the steps and your life will be perfect. You've got to kind of
take ownership of that, make your time your
own, experiment with it and figure out what works for you. - [Narrator] This whole productivity stuff isn't about reading a book or watching a video and then that's it. We should all be in
control of our own time. And if we're not, then we need
to understand the framework, experiment with different techniques and ultimately make time our own. Thank you for watching.
