Make Time: Highlight, Laser, Energize, Reflect
A daily four-step loop that changes your defaults instead of making you faster at the wrong things
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 95%
Make Time rejects the efficiency premise of most productivity advice — that you should get faster at whatever is already in front of you. Instead it treats email, meetings, notifications and feeds as 'defaults' set by culture and software, and gives you a daily loop to override them: pick one Highlight, build barriers so you can Laser in on it, Energize the body that powers the attention, and Reflect on the day as an experiment rather than a verdict. It is explicitly a menu of ~87 tactics, not a regime: you keep the two or three that work for you and discard the rest.
Origin
Developed by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky out of a decade running structured design sprints at Google Ventures, where they controlled every default of the workday (how time, technology and interaction were organized) to hit big goals in five days. They started porting those same default-changes into their personal lives, blogged the experiments at make time.blog, and published the book Make Time in 2018. Related concepts they credit: attention residue (researcher Sophie Leroy, University of Washington, which Knapp says he learned about via Cal Newport) and the low-information diet (Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek).
Core principles
- 01Efficiency is the wrong lever — the goal is not to go faster but to put the most important thing first and build the day around it.
- 02The Busy Bandwagon (the internalized expectation that you should always be busy and instantly responsive) and Infinity Pools (any endlessly-replenishing feed: email, Instagram, TikTok, news, streaming) reinforce each other into a bad flywheel.
- 03Willpower will not win against engineered products; you change the environment, not your grit.
- 04People already know what they want to make time for — the bottleneck is making the time, not choosing the goal.
- 05A day can be a mess and still be a good day if the one Highlight moment landed.
- 06Treat every day as an experiment, not a grade.
How to run it
- 1
Name your two enemies
Explicitly label the Busy Bandwagon (the cultural and internal default that you must be busy and immediately reactive) and your specific Infinity Pools (email, Slack, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, TikTok, news, streaming — anything with pull-to-refresh or an infinite feed). Naming them is what makes the defaults visible enough to change.
Pro tip Include the 'productive' Infinity Pools. Knapp and Zeratsky say email is the single hardest one for them to control — it hides inside a work identity.
Watch out Do not treat this as a moral failing. The products are deliberately friction-free; the point is engineering, not shame.
- 2
Choose one Highlight
In the morning (or the night before), decide the single thing you want to be able to name as the highlight of your day, and write it down. Size it to a 60–90 minute block — roughly the time it takes to really get into the zone on something.
Pro tip Pick from three lenses: urgency (this genuinely has to happen today), satisfaction (I'll be proud I finished it), or joy (this is what I'll actually remember). Trust your gut about which one the day needs.
Watch out A Highlight is not a to-do list and not your OKRs. If it always comes from your boss's radar you have not escaped the defaults.
- 3
Laser — build barriers before the block
Put physical and procedural speed bumps between you and the Infinity Pools so the Highlight is the easiest thing in reach: delete apps from the phone, stay logged out on the computer, kill feeds, put the phone on another floor, remove the TV from the main room, or go somewhere with no internet.
Pro tip Think of it spatially: the Highlight is a great sandwich ten feet away and the apps are candy right in your face. Move the candy, don't fight it.
Watch out Half-measures like toggling Wi-Fi on and off are not enough friction — the speed bump must cost more than a click.
- 4
Energize — fuel the attention
Attention is a body function, so protect sleep, food, movement and human contact as the input to the Highlight, not as a separate self-improvement project. Zeratsky's two pillars after years of iteration: sleep environment (no phone in the bedroom, phone charging on a different floor, an eye mask) and outsourced exercise accountability (a personal trainer or coached app) so the decision is not remade each day.
Pro tip Same experimental posture applies: try a change, watch what it does to your focus block, keep or drop it.
Watch out Do not turn this into biohacking. The bar is 'am I well enough to pay attention', not optimization.
- 5
Reflect — run the day as an experiment
At the end of the day, look at the Highlight you wrote down and note simply whether it happened, what helped, what got in the way, and whether the fix is an energy tweak or a focus barrier. Adjust one variable tomorrow.
Pro tip Writing the Highlight on a visible sticky note creates the reflection loop for free — you will run across it at day's end and instantly know the answer.
Watch out Curiosity about your day, not self-judgment about your day. A missed Highlight is data, not a verdict.
In the wild
Knapp's Highlight was preparing for this podcast — both satisfying and genuinely urgent. He blew the first focus block on email, then finally got into the zone in the second, at which point his 12-year-old son burst in asking him to come sledding one last time before the rare Washington snow melted. His first reaction was no. Then he re-asked the Highlight question: what will I actually remember? He went sledding, came back, and finished the prep at maybe 75–80% of what he wanted.
→ He got a memory his son called 'a great last sled run' and still shipped the prep — because the written Highlight kept him from churning on email all day. He calls it 'I screwed up twice but it still turned out pretty good.'
Playing wooden trains with his young kids, Knapp realized his son was saying 'Dad Dad Dad' while he was unconsciously on his phone doing 'work' that was really a low-friction dopamine hit. Out of rage at himself he deleted email, Facebook and every other infinite-content app from the phone.
→ Over a decade later he still has no email on his phone. He reinstalls it for travel and removes it again, and describes the steady state as relief from the 'static' of attention residue.
Common mistakes
Trying to do all 87 tactics
The system is a menu, not a checklist. Knapp and Zeratsky use different tactics from each other and some of each other's don't work for them. Finding two that stick is a huge win; treating the full list as a pass/fail is how people bounce off it.
Optimizing the defaults instead of changing them
Getting faster at inbox-zero, meetings and notifications makes you a better reaction machine. The loop only pays off if you first displace the defaults with the Highlight.
Treating a relapse as failure
Reinstalling the app you deleted is expected. The cycle of removing, reinstalling and removing again is fine as long as it is deliberate — what breaks the system is the shame that makes you abandon it entirely.
Is it for you?
Best for
Knowledge workers, founders and product leaders who are technically productive but end most days without having moved the one thing they actually care about
Not ideal for
Roles with no discretionary time at all (a nurse on shift, a line cook) where the highlight has to sit outside work hours entirely, and for people who genuinely need real-time responsiveness as the job
From the transcript
“most productivity advice focuses on getting better and faster about doing the things that are already in front of you”
“so the four parts are create a highlight laser energize and reflect”
“it's not really about productivity it's not about time management it's really just about look in any given day we're lucky if we can have…”
“if you just have those moments things can sometimes be a mess outside of that and you still feel really good about your days”
From the episode
Making time for what matters
Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky (authors of Sprint and Make Tim