Make Time

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.

Passion projects, family fun, learning new things in your spare time, none of these magically meander into your life. They’re the things that get left by the wayside unless we deliberately cultivate them. But because we want them to be big, we think they have to be.

As a result, we never start, as we don’t feel the little time we have is worth it. That couldn’t be more wrong. Spending anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes on a single activity that matters to you can give you an immense feeling of contentment. That’s what the authors call your highlight – and you should pick one each day. They distinguish three kinds of highlights:

Important. What’s an absolutely necessary activity or project? From a client presentation to your kid’s soccer game, this should make you feel like you took care of your duties once you complete it. Meaningful. What will make you the most satisfied? Writing a page for your novel? Starting a market research group at work? This is about prioritizing something you technically don’t need to do, but really want to. It’s for yourself. Joyful. Sometimes, you need to just goof off to find your inner child again. Maybe it’ll be a massage, an hour of guitar lessons, or a spontaneous trip into the mountains. This highlight is for the soul.

You can choose a different highlight each day, but once you do and commit to making time for it, you’ll finally start moving towards what you really want in life.

The authors group time wasters into two big categories: work and entertainment. Both exploit our tendency to react to external stimuli by default because that’s how our brains are wired. First, there’s the Busy Bandwagon of work, on which new tasks appear quicker than we can take care of existing ones. Second, Infinity Pools of entertainment want to suck us into their endless spirals of mostly meaningless content in order to monetize our attention. Doing ever more and improving our willpower isn’t enough, we need to redesign our environment to minimize distractions. When it comes to ensuring laser-focus on your highlight, here are some things you can do: Delete social media and email apps from your phone. Log out of social media accounts online to give yourself more time to consider using them when you go there. Check the news once a week instead of multiple times a day. There are many more steps you can take, from changing triggers to avoiding cues, but implementing the above…