Make Time
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What is Make Time about?
Make Time is Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky's daily framework for attention: choose one highlight for the day, get into laser mode by fighting distraction, energize your body, and reflect each evening on what worked. Written by two former Google designers, it offers 87 optional tactics to sample rather than a rigid system to obey.
Key ideas from Make Time
Pick a Daily Highlight
Each morning choose one thing, roughly an hour's worth, that you want to be the highlight of your day, chosen for urgency, satisfaction, or joy. It becomes the anchor your schedule bends around.
Fight the Infinity Pools
Apps with endless refreshing feeds are engineered to consume attention. Their signature move, the distraction-free phone, means deleting social apps and email from your phone entirely, making distraction inconvenient instead of relying on willpower.
Experiment, Do Not Obey
The book is a menu, not a diet. Run each tactic as a small experiment, keep what works for your life, drop what does not, and use nightly reflection notes as the feedback loop.
Lines worth keeping
- Your defaults were designed by companies that profit from your distraction, redesign them.
- A day with one chosen highlight beats a day of forty finished errands.
Is Make Time worth reading?
Yes, and it is the friendliest book in the genre: light, funny, and refreshingly free of guilt. Because it is a tactic menu, it can feel like a listicle, and readers of Deep Work or Digital Minimalism will find overlap. Read the framework chapters, then treat the 87 tactics as a reference to raid.
Jake Knapp & John Zeratsky · 2018 · Habits & Productivity · Distilshelf editorial · Updated August 2026