Book: Make Time

The authors observe the complexities of modern life and describe them as following:

• The Busy Bandwagon (the collective demand to be productive)
• The Infinity Pools (the endless streams of content we consume, e.g. social media, television, etc.)

When that’s what we’re up against, how can we ever make time?

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

1. How to escape the busy bandwagon (the collective demand to be productive)
2. Choose your daily highlight, ask: “What do I want to be the highlight of my day?”. It’s not the only thing you’ll do each day, but it gives you a chance to be proactive about how you spend your time instead of letting technology, office or other people set your agenda.
3. Distraction free (i)phone is a keeper

✨ How I Discovered It

By researching the book atomic habits a bit more I discovered this book

🧑‍🏫 Who Should Read It?

• Everyone that is feeling like they do not have enough time in a day (altough, it’s all about priorities instead of time)
• People with overloaded mailboxes and smartphone addictions, working and beeing online almost 24/7 (you know what I mean)

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

• I’ve read a lot of books and blogs about being productive and getting things done, but I always felt like it didn’t really fit. There was always the struggle between being really productive and planning vs. being spontaneously and spending time on what actually matters. This book really made me think there is a good middle way between the two camps. 💡 It describes habits that developed slowly for us modern day humans and gives you insights in the things we do automatically.
• I started small with the following changes:
  • Reading news only once a week (this includes twitter)
  • Changed my iPhone into a distraction free iPhone
  • Setting a highlight for the day
  • Unsubscribed some media streaming services

📒 Summary + Notes

Observations

Change your defaults: Like our devices, we have set defaults in many aspects of our lives. Like in the office, every meeting defaults to 20 to 60 minutes even if the task requires just a chat.

The default of Busy Bandwagon is to remain busty in endless tasks. The default of Infinity Pools is to be hooked on endless distractions like television, social feeds, and YouTube videos.

Part of the problem lies in the big gap between our hunter-gatherer roots and our digital modern world. We should change our defaults so that we can make distractions harder to access instead of relying on willpower to constantly fight them.

Stop reacting to distractions Every day we react to things like your calendar, incoming email, an infinite amount of content on the internet. You find it difficult to find time with your family. Being productive does not mean you are doing the most important work, it only means you are reacting to other people’s priorities.

The make time system

1. Highlight. Choose a single activity to prioritize and protect in your calendar
2. Laster. Specific tactics to stay laser-focused on your highlight
3. Energize. How to charge your battery with exercise, food, sleep, quiet, and face-to-face time
4. Reflect. How to adjust and improve your system

HIGHLIGHT: to choose your daily Highlight, ask: “What do I want to be the highlight of my day?”

LASER: The key to getting into Laser mode and focusing on your Highlight is to create barriers to distraction.

ENERGIZE: When you don’t take care of your body, your brain can’t do its job.

REFLECT: Fine-tune your days with the Scientific Method: Observe -> Guess -> Experiment -> Measure.

In the book there are all kinds of tactics for all 4 stages of the system, go check it out or read a summary.