Talk to Make Time like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
Make Time is a practical guide from two former Google Ventures designers who grew frustrated watching their own attention get swallowed by the default rhythms of the modern workday. Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky argue that the standard advice to improve focus — get up earlier, optimize your calendar, practice more willpower — misses the problem. The real obstacle is the Infinity Pool apps and Busy Bandwagon culture that have colonized modern life, making reactive busyness feel like productivity.
The book's framework rests on a single daily question: what is the one thing you most want to make time for today? They call this the Highlight. It's not necessarily urgent or important in the professional sense — it might be a project, a hobby, or time with family. The Highlight gives the day a center of gravity that resists the pull of the urgent.
What it gets right
- 1.
The Highlight is the most important move in the framework: picking one meaningful thing you want to accomplish each day before the day's reactive current takes over.
- 2.
Infinity Pools (social media, news feeds, YouTube) are engineered to refill infinitely. The only way to reclaim attention is to remove the default access points, not to rely on willpower.
- 3.
The Busy Bandwagon — the cultural assumption that being constantly available and occupied signals importance — is a trap, not a virtue.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Jake Knapp is a designer and author who spent ten years at Google and Google Ventures, where he created the Design Sprint methodology. John Zeratsky is a designer and former partner at Google Ventures who has worked with dozens of startups on product strategy. Together they wrote Sprint (2016), which introduced the five-day problem-solving workshop now used by companies worldwide. Make Time, published in 2018, grew out of their personal experiments with reclaiming attention from the products they helped build.
