PDF Summary:Make Time, by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky

Do you feel overwhelmed by assignments, meetings, and obligations? Are you constantly interrupted by email, social media, and the urge to follow every headline? Does it feel like there’s never enough time in the day, and none for what you really want to do?

In Make Time, Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky argue that we live in an information landscape designed to steal our time and attention. In order to escape from all of our modern distractions, you must be proactive to take back your time. The authors offer tips, tricks, and hacks to reclaim control of your day-to-day life and make time for the things that matter most.

This guide provides an overview of the lifestyle adjustments Knapp and Zeratsky recommend while examining their benefits and practicality. We also explore research on the effects of the modern world on the mind and body and how other experts on motivation and time management suggest you refocus your energy and your life.

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Take Time Back From Technology

Today’s information industry has fine-tuned its tactics to keep you checking your apps, responding to notifications, and consuming new media to such a degree that it takes a concerted effort to resist its drag on your attention. From their careers in product development, Knapp and Zeratsky speak from firsthand experience about Big Tech’s tactics.

Websites, apps, and streaming services are in constant competition for eyeballs, clicks, and revenue. Unlike industries with a slower turnaround, tech developers are able to determine in real time how successful their strategies are. As a result, the cycle of competition has produced a system of addictive, intermittent rewards coupled with an utter lack of barriers to accessing news, games, memes, and clickbait.

That Screen Will Rot Your Brain

In Digital Minimalism, computer science professor Cal Newport goes into detail about the ways tech companies engineer their products to be addictive. The business models for their often “free” products hinge on keeping your eyes on the screen as long as possible in order to show you more and more ads. As a result, they distract you from other pursuits while negatively impacting your mental well-being. Such products rely on your hard-wired need for social approval and feed you a cycle of intermittent rewards.

“Intermittent rewards,” or “intermittent reinforcement,” is when a behavior (such as refreshing a news app) is rewarded randomly instead of consistently. This form of reinforcement has been shown to be more effective than any other in the habit-forming cycle, and is one of the key factors that leads to gambling addiction. In Irresistible, marketing professor Adam Alter characterizes digital addiction as a societal epidemic.

The barrage of modern media is so overwhelming that it takes more than sheer strength of will to keep it at bay. The authors contend that you have to actively put barriers back in place to keep your devices from stealing your time.

Lock Down Your Phone

The single most pernicious device that impinges on your ability to concentrate is your smartphone. Phones have completely revolutionized society by bringing great advances to our ability to communicate and access information. However, the price we’ve paid as individuals is a massive drain on our time and attention.

The authors’ first recommendation is to delete all social media apps, games, and even your email from your phone. If that’s too extreme, they suggest you turn off all notifications and remove the apps from your homescreen, forcing you to choose when to use each app. Finally, you can leave your phone behind, especially while you’re working on your Focus. Leave your phone at home, in another room, or even in a locker if one’s available. In other words, turn your phone into a tool that serves you, and not the other way around.

(Shortform note: The negative effects of smartphones may be more insidious than mere time infringement. Psychologist Jeane Twenge, who researches generational differences, has observed that children born after 2005 have experienced a sharp increase in mental health crises, including depression and suicide, coinciding with the rise of relying on their phones and social media as their primary source of human interaction.)

Slow Down Your Email

Many people make clearing their inbox a priority every day. This can become so overwhelming that responding to email uses up most of your productive time. While there are many jobs that require quick email responses, Knapp and Zeratsky point out that for most of us, always responding isn’t as important as you’d think. Your employer or business will benefit more if you spend your time doing meaningful work than if you squander it by reacting to random email queries. If your job is such that some communication is time-sensitive, you can set up an email autoresponse to let people know how to reach you by other means (such as your business phone).

The authors present several strategies to take control of your email time:

• Only respond to email at the end of the day, when your energy is lower. (Email doesn’t require as much mental work as other tasks.)
• Create an email schedule to check two or three times per day. (This can be especially useful if you need to communicate with people in certain time zones around the world.)
• Budget your email time, using apps to lock you out if you have to.

(Shortform note: Research shows that email use negatively affects productivity and results in increased stress, especially in the case of people who mainly use email in response to computer notifications. While “batching” email time, as Knapp and Zeratsky suggest, does restore some productivity, it has no apparent effect on the amount of stress email causes.)

These practices will probably stop you from cleaning out your inbox every day. In that case, Knapp and Zeratsky advise that you set “once a week” as a more realistic goal for an empty inbox. Whichever method you choose, let your colleagues (and friends and family) know that you’re going to address email slowly, and not to expect a rapid response.

(Shortform note: In Deep Work, Cal Newport goes into more explicit detail about how to curb email use. He suggests ways to better compose your messages so that they include all the necessary details and don’t result in an email back-and-forth. He also recommends posting your email response policy online and giving yourself the freedom to ignore any communication that isn’t essential.)

Turn Off Your TV

This recommendation from the authors may be particularly hard to hear, because relaxing at the end of the day is so important, and we’re currently living in a Golden Age of quality TV content. However, most of us don’t realize how much time we actually give up to the TV. The authors suggest making TV an occasional indulgence, not an everyday activity.

(Shortform note: A study by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that during the Covid lockdown of 2020, Americans spent an average of three hours per day watching TV on a variety of devices. However, the study notes that TV use varies with age—people over 75 watch more than five hours per day while people aged 35-44 watch only two hours per day.)

Also, you can save money on your TV by being intentional about what you watch. If you cancel continuous streaming subscriptions, you can still rent individual movies or shows from platforms such as Amazon and YouTube, or borrow DVDs for free from your local library. Most streaming platforms make it possible to subscribe long enough to binge a series and cancel when you’re done. (Shortform note: “Subscription churning” reached its peak during 2021. More recent data showed a decline in streaming subscriptions due to people simply watching less TV once they were no longer stuck at home because of Covid.)

Use Technology Purposefully

In summary, the key to taking your life back from technology is to be proactive about how you use it, instead of reacting to its every demand. In particular, Knapp and Zeratsky advise that you determine which single app or device drains the most of your time and find a way to change how you use it.

While you may not want to abandon social media completely, you should try to be mindful of why and how you use each different platform. Ask yourself what each one’s purpose is for you, and what’s the most efficient way to achieve it. Once you know the answers to those questions, the authors point out that you can better budget your time. (Shortform note: People who’ve successfully left social media behind have reported increased happiness, more quality time, and less of an urge to compare themselves to others. A recent study has shown that even a week-long break from social media can relieve symptoms of depression and anxiety.)

In particular, Knapp and Zeratsky recommend you disconnect from the 24-hour news cycle. Instead, they suggest you set aside time to read the news once per week. Modern news is modeled around sparking fear and anger in consumers in order to drive your attention toward ads. Any events of major importance will still be in the news when you get around to it, and hopefully with more nuanced analysis than spur-of-the-moment “breaking news” allows. If something major happens in the world that you need to know about, the authors insist that it will reach you through other means than your devices, such as hearing about it from people at work.

The Headline Tug-Of-War

Studies document that the “shock and outrage” nature of the 24-hour news cycle has negative effects on mental health, while the decisions of various news outlets about what and how to report information have an outsized influence on policy decisions (known as the CNN Effect).The rapid pace of modern news leaves little time for reflective analysis on the part of readers or journalists, and the sheer volume of headlines forces people to filter information down to what they can process. This can lead people to digesting only the news that already supports their own worldviews.

Surprisingly, Digital Minimalism proponent Cal Newport doesn’t recommend cutting daily news out of your life, if only because staying informed is part of your civic duty. He does recommend controlling your intake by reading or listening to the news once a day, preferably in the morning. That way, if events are taking place that require your attention, you’ll have the energy to research them using credible sources.

In contrast to Newport’s advice to check the news in the morning, Knapp and Zeratsky suggest removing the Internet entirely from your morning routine, arguing that the moment you first log into your email, check the news, or look at social media, your struggle to fight against distraction begins. The longer you can delay that from starting, the longer you’ll feel clear-headed and focused. If you need extra help avoiding the internet, you can even consider putting your home’s router on a vacation timer, so that the Internet is only available for certain hours of the day.

The Distraction Problem Isn’t Yours Alone

In Stolen Focus, journalist Johann Hari is highly critical of the way information technology is designed and implemented, with business models based on disrupting your attention, harvesting your data, and deliberately provoking anger and anxiety in order to increase user engagement. Hari argues that the cascade of negative effects from this cycle affects us not only on the personal level, but is corrosive to society as a whole.

Hari argues that the problem is so overwhelming that it needs to be addressed systemically. Hari calls the type of strategies Knapp and Zeratsky espouse “cruel optimism”—persuading people to try and solve major societal issues with narrow, individual actions. In Hari’s opinion, the problems we face in the Age of Information are too large for small-scale solutions to affect. Hari believes that Big Tech companies should be incentivized to switch to a different business model, one not based on constant distraction.

Not everyone is quite so pessimistic about the pros and cons of information technology. Futurist and author David Brin points to how worldwide information connectivity can engage our natural tendency toward empathy, while much of modern “distracting” entertainment promotes inclusivity and gives voices to otherwise marginalized people.

Create Energy Through Self-Care

Once you’ve selected your Focus for the day and set healthy boundaries to ward off distraction, you’ll still have a hard time pursuing what’s important if your body and mind don’t have the energy to engage. Many of us spend a lot of our time feeling beaten down and exhausted.

Knapp and Zeratsky say that this is because the human body isn’t designed for our modern, sedentary, staring-at-screens lifestyle. They argue that in some ways, we were all better off as hunter-gatherers. Technology has brought us many wonders that we’d never dream of giving up (not to mention health care), but the evolution of our bodies has been unable to keep pace with the changes in lifestyle that have occurred since the agricultural revolution.

Were We Better Off as Cavemen?

In Sapiens, historian Yuval Noah Harari backs up these claims, stating that our foraging ancestors worked less, ate a more varied diet, and suffered less disease than their descendants in agrarian and urban societies. Today, Harari identifies technological disruption as an existential threat (along with nuclear war and environmental catastrophe). Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, doubles down on this idea, calling the agricultural revolution “humanity’s greatest mistake.”

However, not everyone shares this rosy appraisal of our ancestors. Economist Diethrich Vollrath points out that any hunter-gatherers who led happy, well-balanced lives were merely the lucky few who survived early childhood.

Knapp and Zeratsky suggest that in order to bring energy to your Focus, you need to take steps to align yourself with the active way of life that your body and mind are designed for. They give guidelines about how to make realistic changes to your level of activity, the kind of food you eat, and the way you relax to recharge your batteries so that you can give your Focus your all.

Move Around

Knapp and Zeratsky reject the idea of grueling, exhausting workout routines. Instead, they argue that you can benefit from a mere 20 minutes of exercise per day. Walking is perfect—it helps warm up your mind, and you don’t even have to add it to your to-do list; you can find opportunities that are already there. You can walk at least part of the way to your job, choose to take the stairs over the elevator, or simply park farther away from the grocery store when you’re shopping.

(Shortform note: The Harvard Medical School cites research that walking for as little as 20 minutes each day can reduce your risk of heart disease and obesity and could collectively save Americans over $100 billion per year in health care. For those who aren’t used to getting out and walking, the Mayo Clinic provides a 12-week schedule to slowly increase your exercise duration.)

You may already have your own workout routine, but perhaps you find it hard to squeeze an hour-long workout at the gym into your schedule. In this case, time may not be as much of a barrier as you think. The authors point to research that shows that short, high-intensity workouts are very beneficial as well. (Shortform note: The most well-known take on high-intensity exercise is the 7-Minute Workout, involving 12 exercises performed in rapid succession with minimal equipment. It combines aerobic and resistance training in a way that increases weight loss, cardio health, and muscular fitness.)

Eat Smart

It’s been well established that making healthier food choices gives you a longer energy boost than relying on sugar, processed foods, and caffeine. However, Knapp and Zeratsky admit that diets are disheartening, difficult, and hard to stick to. Plus, among the deluge of different diet crazes, it’s hard to keep up with what’s healthy and what isn’t.

(Shortform note: “Fad diets'' usually revolve around stigmatizing certain foods and removing them from your diet. While these diets may cause weight loss in the short term, they can also lead to nutritional deficiencies and food cravings that eventually make the diets fail. Despite the fact that there’s little evidence that such diets work, the “diet craze industry” is now worth over $70 billion per year.)

The authors recommend following the most basic nutritional common sense: eat non-processed food, in reasonable amounts, at appropriate times. They suggest choosing mostly fruits and vegetables, and planning your meals with a salad as the main feature. When you snack, eat fruits and nuts instead of processed sugar, and only when you’re hungry—not when you’re bored.

(Shortform note: The authors derive their advice from Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food. Pollan derides the 20th-century transition from plant-based to processed food in our diets, and he recommends a shift back to meals based on vegetables and fruit, with meat used only as a side dish. Unlike Knapp and Zeratsky, Pollan doesn’t recommend snacking.)

Caffeinate Wisely

A lot of us rely on coffee, tea, or caffeinated soda as a pick-me-up to get us through the day. There’s a catch to caffeine, though—it doesn’t really give you energy. The authors point out that what caffeine actually does is block the chemical adenosine from reaching the receptors in your brain. Your body’s buildup of adenosine throughout the day is what makes you drowsy, so by blocking it, caffeine merely makes you not feel sleepy. (Shortform note: In essence, caffeine interferes with your brain’s natural wake-sleep rhythm. Research does show that caffeine increases your brain’s metabolism, but it decreases your brain’s blood flow at the same time. Overuse of caffeine is known to cause anxiety, sleep problems, and other bodily issues.)

The authors don’t suggest giving up caffeine, but they do recommend using it strategically. If you’ve scheduled your Focus for the morning or midday, you can time your caffeine intake so it goes into effect right as you're getting into the swing.

Contrary to common belief, it does no good to take caffeine early in the morning. Your body has metabolized its adenosine overnight, so when you wake up, there’s none left for the caffeine to block. Instead, the authors recommend having your first cup around 10:00 a.m. (Shortform note: Another reason not to have caffeine first thing in the morning is that your body’s cortisol levels are elevated after waking. Caffeine boosts it higher, and high cortisol levels can lead to weight gain and heart disease over time.)

Because caffeine takes hours to flush out of your system, your final cup should probably be around 2 p.m. Any caffeine taken later in the day will interfere with your sleep, leaving you groggy in the morning. Everyone’s body processes caffeine differently, so you may have to experiment to determine when you should have your first and last cup.

One trick the authors propose is taking a “caffeine nap” to boost energy and concentration. The idea is to drink a cup of coffee or tea, then nap for 15 minutes. It takes that long for the caffeine to be absorbed, while the nap helps clear adenosine out of your system. (Shortform note: Studies have shown the effectiveness of caffeine naps in combating afternoon drowsiness in general and improving the alertness of sleepy drivers in particular. A more recent study has shown the benefits of caffeine naps for night-shift employees.)

Relax During the Day

The human brain wasn’t built for constant stimulation. In order to maintain energy for your Focus, as well as for everything else you have to do, it’s important to take quality breaks from the pressures of work and day-to-day life.

If at all possible, the authors suggest that you take a walk through a place where you’re surrounded by trees. If you can’t get out into nature, at least make time for a walk in a park or a tree-shaded neighborhood street. Any exposure to nature at all has been shown to alleviate stress. (Shortform note: In the 1980s, the Japanese government coined the term Shinrin-Yoku, or “forest bathing,” to encourage people to take a break from oppressive, urban settings and experience the natural world. Research has confirmed that exposure to nature brings significant benefits to mental and physical health.)

Also, look for ways to interact with people face-to-face, instead of by phone or by email. Doing so boosts energy in ways that social media doesn’t. (Shortform note: A large body of evidence shows that the quantity and quality of your social relationships strongly affects your physical and mental health. The pervasive problem of social isolation has only been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and while social media allows people to connect when they cannot be physically present with each other, it presents distorted views of other people’s lives, more so than face-to-face interaction.)

Sleep Well at Night

Given all the stress of modern life, getting a good night’s sleep may seem like a far-fetched idea. However, the authors point out specific steps you can take to improve your odds of sleeping through the night.

First, ban all electronics from your bedroom—phones, tablets, computers, TVs—everything except an alarm clock. Later in the evening, reading is a preferable activity to looking at a screen, and reading on paper is better than reading on a backlit device. (Shortform note: the National Sleep Foundation concurs, pointing out several ways that electronics prevent you from resting, such as delaying the time you go to sleep, overstimulating your mind late at night, and disturbing your sleep with unwanted flashes and buzzes.)

In the hours before bed, the authors suggest that you simulate sundown by turning off or dimming the lights in your home and switching your electronics into night mode. Dimming the lights signals your body that it’s time to start winding down toward sleep. If you find that you’re normally groggy in the morning, there are lamps that can simulate sunrise before you wake by slowly increasing in brightness. (Shortform note: “Light therapy,” the use of bright lights at certain points in the day, can reset your body’s natural circadian rhythm, treating insomnia and other sleep disorders.)

If you do miss out on sleep, don’t try to catch up by sleeping later on the weekend. All this does is confuse your body’s internal clock, in much the same way as jet lag.(Shortform note: Your body’s “sleep debt,” the gradual buildup of lost sleep over time, can be repaid, but not all at once. The best way is to add an extra hour of sleep every night over an extended period.)

Implementing the Make Time Strategy

The sheer scope of Knapp and Zeratsky’s recommendations will no doubt seem overwhelming at first. Setting priorities and boundaries, changing your digital habits, and learning to lead a healthier lifestyle are each, on their own, monumental tasks. Thankfully, you shouldn’t expect to tackle any or all of it at once.

The author’s tips and suggestions are merely that. By trying what works and what doesn’t for you personally, you can incrementally rearrange your life in a way that will be transformative over time. To begin, you might only pick one recommendation to follow from each of the three big categories: selecting your Focus, protecting your Focus, and taking care of yourself. Keep doing the ones that work; forget the ones that don’t. Since the last thing you want is to add to your to-do list, the best tips to employ are the ones that fit into your life with the least amount of hassle. (Shortform note: Many authors tout how small, incremental changes have a snowball effect over time. In Small Move, Big Change, Wall Street executive Caroline Arnold espouses the idea of “microresolutions” to make personal change achievable. In Tiny Habits, behavioral scientist B.J. Fogg lays out steps to identify the smallest version of a change you want to make, in order to make it easy and actionable.)

The key is to set realistic expectations for yourself, try out some of the authors’ suggestions, and look back every day on what worked and what didn’t. While beginning the process of gradual change, the authors recommend keeping a daily log of your progress. Record whether you completed your Focus, which tactics you employed, and how you might tweak them to your advantage. Also be sure to write down moments you enjoyed, and how you might be able to repeat them.

Instead of being a chore, taking notes makes you more aware of how you’re spending your energy and attention. Knapp and Zeratsky insist that keeping a log doesn’t need to be a permanent to-do item, but it does keep you mindful that making small changes has a snowball effect that will let you claim more and more control of your time. (Shortform note: In addition to keeping you focused on your progress, journaling has been shown to have many other benefits. Journaling can help you cope with emotional stress, attain personal goals, and even improve physical health.)

Above all, remember that “Perfect is the enemy of good.” Any process of self-improvement will inevitably run over bumps in the road, and the industry of technological distraction continues to sharpen its tools. Don’t expect every day to go as planned, and don’t expect that you won’t indulge in old habits now and then.

(Shortform note: In The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown argues that the true purpose of perfectionism is to control other people’s perceptions and avoid being shamed or judged. Because it’s rooted in unrealistic expectations, perfectionism causes more painful thoughts and feelings than it could ever prevent.)

In conclusion, Knapp and Zeratsky’s goal isn’t to help you be more efficient or productive, or to add more chores to your to-do list. Their purpose is to help you make more time for what matters. The more you’re able to do that for yourself, the more paths will open, and whatever you’ve dreamed of “someday making time for” may come within reach sooner than you expect.

(Shortform note: In First Things First, Stephen Covey follows up his advice to focus on what’s significant rather than pressing by tying your daily schedule to what gives your life meaning. In Find Your Why, Simon Sinek places finding your purpose as the central motivator that helps you avoid distraction and brings you fulfillment. Lastly, in Grit, author Angela Duckworth affirms that those whose daily work is filled with purpose are more satisfied and happy with their lives overall.)