I recently read the book Make Time by Jack Knapp and John Zeratsky.
The book is about how you can reprioritize your time to accomplish more of what’s important. People spend too much of their days on what the authors call the “busy bandwagon,” spinning their wheels without having much to show for it. The book gives a bunch of techniques that it says will help you spend your time more wisely.
The main strategy is that every day you should plan out a “highlight,” which is the most important thing you want to accomplish that day, and schedule a specific time to do it. Then make sure you have no distractions during that time block.
It also argues that you really want to maintain “Laser Focus,” or stick to doing one thing at a time. Don’t pause your work to check e-mail, or Facebook, or to do some other work. Every time you switch contexts, it takes a huge amount of time and energy to get back into the flow of what you were doing.
It warns against what it calls “Infinity Pools,” which are things that can waste as much time as you let them, because they contain an infinite amount of constantly refreshing content. Time-wasters such as television, Facebook, Twitter, video games, blogs, etc. (Wait. Forget I put blogs on that list.)
Instead of setting up an overarching methodology, the book lays out 87 specific tactics. I like that approach. Realistically, you aren’t going to completely change your life. But it is feasible for you to adopt specific strategies to make incremental improvements to your life.
Where the book falls apart, however, is that most of these strategies are things that normal people just aren’t going to do. They’re suggestions like “Get rid of your TV,” “Give up sugar,” “Exercise every day,” and “Never use social media – ever.”
If you’re the kind of person who would do these things, you’d already be doing them, You aren’t going to start just because a self-help book tells you to.
This is my biggest problem with a lot of self-help books: They offer advice that realistically most people just aren’t going to follow. This gives the authors an excuse – They can say, “I told you what to do, and if you don’t listen that’s your own damn fault.” But really, their advice boils down to “Your life will be better if you can just be a perfect human with infinite will-power.” Well, duh. But since nobody is actually perfect, people don’t follow the advice in these books, and then feel bad about themselves. But this isn’t a problem with normal people for failing to be perfect. It’s a problem with self-help books that offer advice that can only be followed by a mythical perfect person.
I tried to do a Google Image search of Jesus reading a self-help book, but unsurprisingly nothing came up.
Now, Make Time isn’t as bad in this aspect than other books I’ve read. And they do have some suggestions for overcoming a lack of willpower in order to follow their suggestions. (Like delete all apps from your phone, block social media sites from your computer, and physically put your TV in a closet. Or less extreme solutions, such as daily time-limits on distractions, or logging out of social media every time you use it so the slight hassle of logging back in might deter you from using it next time.)
But it does seem to lack awareness that most people do not share the same life-circumstances as its authors, who are wealthy high-ranking knowledge-workers with the freedom to set their own schedules and whose only responsibilities and time-commitments are those that they make an active choice to take on. That describes a very tiny percentage of people.
Much of the book is not so relevant for people who have far more of their schedule imposed on them by outside forces such as their job and family responsibilities. If your boss is calling or your baby needs a diaper change, you can’t just refer them to your auto-responder saying “I’m maintaining laser-focus on my highlight, and will get back to you at a time that is more convenient for me.”
Still, there are some nuggets of wisdom in there. I’d say it’s worth reading if and only if you’re the kind of person who is able to evaluate each of their individual pieces of advice with enough self-knowledge to understand if it will work for you, and ignore the ones that won’t, without any self-judgement.
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