Make Time: Pick a Daily Highlight and Build Barriers Against Distraction

Knapp explains that he and Zeratsky spent more than a decade "designing time" through highly structured sprints with startups, where they could change how people work hour by hour. They started applying what worked to their own lives and found it ran counter to most productivity advice. Make Time began as a side project and blog to share those experiments.

Zeratsky says people usually already know what they want to make time for, and the problem is actually doing it. Most advice helps you move faster through the inbox and calendar, but those are just the defaults of life and work. His answer is to flip the thinking: put the most important thing first, accept that the small stuff still has to be done, and build around it.

Knapp describes the busy bandwagon as the expectation that everyone is busy. "I'm busy" is the default answer to "how's it going", and the feeling that you should be busy and responsive drives stress, even for him. He says escaping the resulting reaction mode is the core thing to change.

Zeratsky defines infinity pools as anything you can pull to refresh or that streams, from Instagram to email, which is the hardest for them to avoid. The two forces combine into a bad flywheel, because apps are built to exploit the feeling that you must be on top of everything. Naming them is the first step toward changing the defaults.

The authors contrast big "Project A" goals, which are hard to start and have slow payoffs, with small, urgent tasks like email, meetings, TikTok and even OKRs, which give instant dopamine. Knapp admits he grades himself B-minus on a typical day and needs new experiments every few months. A framework gives you a path back when things go badly, whereas random hacks tend to fade.

Lenny adds that you don't need to adopt everything. One or two changes can make a real dent, and reinstalling an app you deleted is not failure.

The framework has four parts: highlight, laser, energize and reflect. The highlight is the thing you would like to say was the best part of today, and the authors call it the anchor of everything. Aim for a 60 to 90 minute block, ideally when your energy is at its peak, and write it on a sticky note.

Laser covers the tactics for focusing when that time arrives. Energize is about sleep, food and exercise, and reflect treats the day as a scientific experiment. Knapp stresses that it is not really about productivity or time management, but about creating one great moment of peak attention, which does not happen daily but can happen more often than not.

Lenny says one meaningful thing finished is a great day, even though the dopamine for hard projects is far in the future. Zeratsky's highlights are usually focused creative work, which he protects by blocking the first half of his day. Highlight candidates come from three sources: urgency, satisfaction and joy.

Zeratsky's tactic, Design Your Day, uses the calendar as a canvas to shape how you spend time instead of something that tells you what to do. He and his team use a calendar template with content buckets for certain meetings and reserved focus blocks. Lenny notes that Nir Eyal gave similar advice about treating the calendar as your to-do list.

Knapp contributes the Groundhog Day idea: like the film's hero, you get to try the day again, so you can be curious about what happened without beating yourself up. He scheduled every part of his morning, found tasks took longer than he thought, and adjusted the template to be kinder to himself. Blocking time also stops others booking over it.

The authors believe strongly in people's intuition about the highest-leverage thing to do with a free window. Even employees with several layers of bosses often know it, even when it is not on the OKRs. The goal is to create space for that work.

Zeratsky mostly picks big chunky projects, but he also pays attention to when he needs joy, fun or play, such as a run or cooking a big dinner. For people in jobs like nursing, where they are on their feet all day, the highlight may be something to unwind or look after themselves at the end of the day. He writes his highlight the night before, and some of his highlights are social, such as having friends over.

Knapp tells a real example. His highlight was preparing for this podcast, but the first focus block went badly because of email and distraction. In the second block, with a deadline looming, he got into the zone. Then his 12-year-old son asked him to go sledding in rare island snowfall, and after a moment's resistance Knapp went out.

The sledding turned out to be the real highlight, because it was something he would remember. He returned and finished roughly three quarters of his prep, and still avoided spending the day on email because he had written the highlight down. His conclusion is that the point is feeling more intentional, and he stresses that Make Time lets you stack-rank priorities and see where you made the decision.

Zeratsky's principle is that you will not white-knuckle your way past Twitter. He has left Instagram and Facebook, keeps no Twitter or LinkedIn apps on his phone, stays logged out on his computer, and uses a Chrome extension that removes the LinkedIn feed so he can use it as a phone book. He also enables two-factor authentication everywhere as an extra speed bump.

Knapp has no email on his phone, a decision he made around 2012 after being on his phone while playing trains with his young son. He deleted every app with an infinite stream of content and describes the discomfort followed by relief, comparing the pull of the phone to the ring in *The Lord of the Rings*. He cites attention residue, a term from researcher Sophie Leroy, as the static these apps create even when unused.

Both say it is fine to reinstall something when you really need it, as part of reflecting on how it is going. Knapp suggests removing just the one app that is your kryptonite for a day or even two hours to feel the effect. Lenny points out that deleting an app deletes nothing, since you can log back in.

Zeratsky keeps the TV out of the main living space, and Knapp uses a projector that has to be set up. Zeratsky charges his phone on a different floor so that the last thing he does at night is not on his phone. Some people with social media jobs keep a separate work device, and a separate baby-monitor device could also work.

Lenny's wife watches TikTok through videos he sends and checks them on his phone. That limits the time and means she sees only the best ones. Zeratsky's wife passes him a news digest in conversation. Knapp argues that good or important things will find you, and the idea that you must stay current with everything is a job you can quit or take a sabbatical from.

Zeratsky's durable habit is to read the weekly *Economist* as his main news source, since anything of consequence gets distilled into one summary by week's end. Lenny likens this to the opposite of Twitter and mentions Tim Ferriss's idea of waiting for people to tell you what you need to know.

Knapp pairs two email tactics. First, reset expectations with a signature or autoresponder saying you check email once or twice a day because you are working on an important project, and invite people to text if urgent. He cites a classic photocopier study showing that adding "because" makes people far more likely to comply, and says the real value is renegotiating expectations with yourself.

Second, slow your inbox. If you reply fast, people reply fast, and the hamster wheel speeds up, so checking less often and dropping the goal of an empty inbox slows the loop. A reader named Krissa inspired Knapp to cancel the internet at his small office, where he now writes and does focus work offline, and others can use a vacation timer on their router.

Knapp uses a candy-and-sandwich image: the highlight is a sandwich ten feet away, and apps are candy in your face, so push the candy farther away than the sandwich. Lenny adds Odysseus tying himself to the mast. Knapp warns that becoming a reaction machine means no Project A work, and Lenny recommends Mailman HQ, which batches email delivery.

Zeratsky explains that energize is a booster for laser: your ability to focus depends on sleep, food, exercise and the right amount of human contact. He cautions against going crazy with biohacking. He now thinks sleep is the most important factor, so he keeps his phone and TV out of the bedroom and recently started wearing an eye mask.

For exercise, he realized he kept making excuses and hired a personal trainer for accountability. Lenny says he uses the Future app and now works out three times a week.

Knapp describes reflect as treating the day as an experiment, not a marble gravestone of successes or failures. Looking at your written highlight at day's end shows whether it happened, and a short gratitude journal by the bed tunes your brain to look for good moments. His summary is curiosity about your day instead of self-judgment.

To wrap up Make Time, Knapp says that even writing a highlight on a sticky note is a step in the right direction, and recommends the book or maketime.blog. His team at their VC firm decided to do main communication in Notion rather than email or Slack.

With the remaining time Knapp describes the design sprint: going from zero to a prototype and a test in five days, using a scripted set of activities. It grew out of a Google side project that had gone nowhere for a year and a half, which he and two colleagues rescued in one focused week by building a prototype instead of writing the perfect plan. He then ran hundreds of sprints at Google Ventures and wrote *Sprint*.

Zeratsky says sprints turn abstract ideas into something people can click and try, and are especially valuable to startups with limited runway. The faster you learn whether you are on track, the faster you can course correct. Lenny adds that, for product managers, a five-day contained experiment beats months of distracted exploration.

The authors finish with their program, Character Labs, a four-week sprint program for pre-seed software startups, with applications at character.vc/labs. They say it works best where there is a big behavioral risk, such as convincing industrial plant operators to trust AI, and that they have found it especially valuable for AI startups. A free Miro template for sprints is available at sprintbook.com.