Make Time
There's always more to do. The default is to be busy. But you can redesign your default.
Make Time is Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky's daily focus system built around four repeating phases: choosing a single meaningful Highlight, using Laser tactics to protect your attention, Energizing your body to sustain focus, and Reflecting to run personal experiments. Unlike conventional productivity systems that optimize for volume of output, Make Time redesigns your daily defaults to create space for what actually matters.
“I have a project proposal due Thursday that I keep putting off. But I also feel like I spend the whole day in Slack and email and never make real…”
Pick one Highlight, defeat the Infinity Pools, and end every day fulfilled
Make Time structures every day as a four-phase cycle: Highlight, Laser, Energize, Reflect. In the Highlight phase, you spend roughly five minutes each morning naming a single priority — urgent, satisfying, or joyful — that will define the day's success. In the Laser phase, you deploy specific tactics from a menu of approximately 87 to defeat 'Infinity Pools' — social feeds, email, and other endlessly replenishing content sources — and protect 60–90 minutes of focused work on your Highlight. The Energize phase treats physical energy as a prerequisite for mental focus: movement, real food, sleep, and strategic caffeine. Finally, the Reflect phase closes the loop with a 10-minute end-of-day review: Did you do your Highlight? What worked? What drained you? What experiment to try tomorrow? The ~87 tactics are framed as a personal experimentation menu, not a rigid prescription — the daily cycle is the constant, the tactics are the variable.
Modern devices and work culture are engineered to make you reactive. The Busy Bandwagon rewards looking productive over being intentional, while Infinity Pools — email, Slack, social feeds, YouTube — replenish infinitely and capture attention by design. Most people end their days having been 'on' all day but having never touched the work that actually matters to them.
By naming one Highlight each morning and systematically shutting off the Infinity Pools that would consume your day, you create 60–90 minutes of protected, focused time for what matters most — and build a daily reflection habit that makes each week sharper than the last.
- A sense of what feels most important, satisfying, or meaningful to you right now
- An honest inventory of your biggest digital distractions and reactive habits
- Awareness of your energy patterns and when you do your best focused work
- Willingness to run small daily experiments and adjust tactics week over week
- A named, time-boxed Highlight for today that defines what a good day looks like before it starts
- A personalized Infinity Pool hit list with specific Laser tactics assigned to each distraction source
- A completed Daily Notes Sheet with a day score, energy observations, and one tactic to try tomorrow
- A repeatable morning ritual that takes under 10 minutes and creates intentional direction every day
Watch the methodology work.
Three specimens from a single real session: the same situation, unaided and calibrated, the full transcript, and the skill answering live in the channel where the work happens.
“It's 6pm. You had back-to-back meetings, 53 unread Slacks, and a full email inbox. The project proposal due Thursday hasn't been touched. You feel like you were 'on' all day — and yet you can't point to a single meaningful thing you completed. The proposal guilt will follow you to dinner.”
“You spent five minutes this morning naming your Highlight ('write the problem and approach sections'), sent a heads-up to your manager, and blocked 90 minutes with your phone in the other room. The two sections exist. You checked Slack at 11am and nothing was actually urgent. Tonight's reflection notes a 4/5 day — the phone logout was the move that made the difference. Tomorrow you'll try logging out of desktop Slack too.”
The same skill, where the work happens.
No new app to learn. The methodology runs over the WhatsApp Business API, so the answer lands as a reply in the thread you’re already in — same rigour, zero context-switch.
What it does, specifically.
Each capability is a distinct move drawn straight from the source methodology — not a generic assistant guessing.
Daily Highlight Selection
Guides you through a five-minute morning ritual to name the single most meaningful focus for your day. You consider three lenses — urgent (must happen today), satisfying (something you'll feel good completing), or joyful (something worth doing for its own sake) — and articulate the Highlight as a specific, completable activity, not a vague theme.
Infinity Pool Audit
Walks you through identifying your personal Infinity Pools — the apps, sites, and feeds that refill with new content every time you check — and surfaces specific tactics to reduce their gravitational pull. Actions range from logging out and removing apps from the home screen to time-boxing email to two set windows per day.
Laser Tactic Recommender
Given your specific work context, distraction patterns, and energy profile, recommends a shortlist of tactics from the book's ~87-tactic menu — covering device defaults, environment design, social norms, and scheduling — that are most likely to help you enter and hold Laser mode during your Highlight block.
Evening Reflect Review
Runs the end-of-day reflection by prompting you to rate the day on a 1–5 scale, note whether you completed your Highlight, identify what gave or drained energy, and name one tactic experiment for tomorrow. Patterns across multiple sessions reveal which changes are producing real results.
Default Settings Reset
Helps you audit and redesign the factory-default settings of your devices, notifications, and physical environment that silently work against intentional focus. One-time changes — moving social apps off your home screen, turning off all non-human notifications, having your phone charge outside the bedroom — compound over every day that follows.
Graded before it shipped.
Every skill is scored against independent scenarios for methodology fidelity before it goes live — not vibes, a rubric.
Daily Notes Sheet
A simple end-of-day log capturing your Highlight (chosen vs. completed), a 1–5 day score, energy observations, and one tactic experiment for tomorrow. Across multiple days it becomes a personal data set that surfaces which tactics are actually working for you.
Infinity Pool Hit List
A personalized audit of your top attention-stealing apps and feeds, with a specific Laser tactic assigned to each one. Unlike generic 'use your phone less' advice, each item has a concrete action: log out, delete from home screen, time-box to one daily window, or block entirely.
Highlight Archive
A running log of your daily Highlights across the week or month. Reviewing it reveals whether you're choosing urgent, satisfying, or joyful Highlights — and whether the work you're highlighting each day reflects what actually matters most to you over time.
Grounded in the original work.
Every answer traces back to a real source and the practitioner who wrote it — not a secondhand summary. Here is the source of record.
Jake Knapp
Jake Knapp is a designer and the creator of the Google Design Sprint, which he developed while serving as a design partner at Google Ventures (GV). He is the New York Times bestselling author of Sprint and, with co-author John Zeratsky, Make Time (2018). Knapp spent over a decade at Google and GV designing products used by hundreds of millions of people before devoting his work to helping individuals reclaim their attention from the same systems he helped build.
Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day
Creator of the Google Design Sprint; former Google Ventures design partner; NYT bestselling co-author of Sprint and Make Time.
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