#831 How to Make Time

Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky is a great book.

It falls into the “Alexandra Amazon-ed it and I immediately swiped it and read it” category along many other books including, most recently, The 5 Second Rule by Mel Robbins.

Jake and John (he goes by JZ in the book) met at Google Ventures where they helped a ton of startups (including Uber, 23andMe, and Slack) develop a ton of cool stuff.

They wrote a different book on their 5-day development process called Sprint.

This book is all about, as you probably guessed by the title, “making time” in our lives to, as per the sub-title of the book: “Focus on What Matters Every Day.”

They have a brilliantly simple four-step framework to make that time and cultivate our ability to focus on what matters every (!) day.

Here’s a super-quick look at the four steps (obviously, check out the book and Notes for more): Highlight + Laser + Energize + Reflect.

First, you want to get clear on what the #1 most important “Highlight” of your day is going to be before you start the day. Think: A 60- to 90-minute chunk of awesome that will make Today a win.

Then, you learn how to focus on that most-important thing by becoming a “Laser.” They have a ton of tactics to hop off of what they call the “Busy Bandwagon” while avoiding the “Infinity Pools” of distraction.

So, we know our Highlight. We focus like a Laser.

Then they wisely tell us we need to Energize. Hard to do quality work with a battery at 0%, eh? (Which, of course, is why we START with Energy in our Big 3.)

They offer a bunch of tactics to help us Energize as well.

Finally, we need to “Reflect.” Basically, we need to run some experiments and see what works.

Then what? Well, then we incrementally aggregate and compound those tiny little micro-Optimizations into more and more awesome.

That’s Today’s +1.

Let’s do a quick run through and make some time Today.

What’s the #1 Highlight for Today? It can be a Work thing or an Energy thing or a Love thing. What concrete, do-able thing can you do to make Today awesome?

OK. Time to Laser in on it. When will you do that thing? Can you eliminate distractions and go all on it? Like a Laser?!

Wonderful. Now let’s make sure you’re Energized. What’s one little thing you can do to get your battery a little more charged Today? Go out for a walk or workout? Take a nap? Meditate? You choose! (And do!)

Finally, at the end of the day, let’s take a moment to Reflect. What worked? What needs a little work? How can you Optimize a little more tomorrow?

Repeat. Forever.

4-Step your way to Optimizing awesome.

🤓 🤓 🤓