Make Time. How to Focus on What Matters Every Day by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky

Part of the attractive of this book are its authors. Jake Knapp spent 10 years at Google and Google Ventures, co-founded Google Meet, and among other products worked on the Gmail team. John Zeratsky worked at Google, and led the design for AdWords Editor, and was part of the team that created the YouTube Channels platform. He also was a partner at Google Ventures. I was really curious to learn how they approached their daily work and what productivity hacks they used.

Make Time is a book about finding focus in daily life. The authors propose a methodology based on defining a highlight for every day, a single activity that you write down and protect in your calendar. It doesn’t mean that it’s the only thing you’ll do, but it ensures that you spend the time on the things that matter to you and don’t spend the day reacting to other people’s priorities.

To beat distraction the authors propose several tactics to achieve laser focus. To manage your energy, you need to take care of exercise, food, sleep, etc. Reflection at the end of the day helps us refine our strategy by asking what worked and what not.

The idea of the book is not to implement all the proposed tactics. “Some tactics will work for you, but some won’t. Pick and test. Look for tactics that seem doable but a little challenging. Look for tactics that sound like fun. Start with one tactic for each step, and build from there.” What works for weeks may not work when circumstances change. After understanding the base of the methodology, you can skim through the book and try what suits you best.

If you are looking for a complete methodology like David Allen’s Getting Things Done, this is not the book. However, if like myself you find GTD too heavy and prefer a more lightweight and flexible approach, you’ll enjoy reading this book.