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Bulletin Board

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Make Time is not about crushing your to-do list, optimizing every hour, or maximizing personal productivity. It's about rethinking the defaults of constant busyness and distraction so you can focus on what matters every day.

Developed as an antidote to the fast-paced, always-connected culture of Silicon Valley, our 2018 book Make Time was a rallying cry for a new class of professionals.

Meet the Time Dorks

Hi, we're Jake and JZ. Most time-management advice is written by or about superhumans. But we're normal, fallible human beings who get stressed out and distracted just like everyone else.

We both worked in the tech industry for a long time. The work was exciting and rewarding, but the always-connected culture and back-to-back meeting schedule left little time for our priorities.

So we decided to do something about it. We took what we learned from designing apps like Gmail and YouTube, and came up with simple ways to fight distraction and take back control. We looked at the success of our design sprint process, and saw principles that anyone could apply to make better use of their time.

We began experimenting with our own habits and routines, trying to make time for what's important to us. We tested hundreds of dorky tactics and took notes on what worked. We shared our results online and asked readers to tell us about their experiences.

With some simple changes, we learned that it's possible to redesign your time -to get more focus, greater attention, and better energy for the things that matter to you every day.

How Make Time Works

Make Time is not macho or hardcore. It's not a one-size-fits-all plan. We've tried plenty of those, and while we did get more done, we didn't like how it made us feel. We wanted Make Time to be different: Flexible. Forgiving. Friendly. It's based around four simple steps.

1. Highlight: Start each day by choosing a priority

Asking yourself " What's going to be the highlight of my day? " ensures that you spend time on what matters most to you and don't lose the entire day reacting to other people's priorities.

2. Laser: Beat distraction to make time

Distractions like email, social media, and breaking news are everywhere. We'll show you how to adjust your devices and apps so you can find Laser mode.

3. Energize: Use the body to recharge the brain

The lifestyle defaults of the 21st Century ignore our evolutionary history and rob us of energy, but with a few small changes, you can reset those defaults and power up.

4. Reflect: Adjust and improve your system

Finally, before going to bed, you'll take a few notes. It's super simple: You'll decide which tactics you want to continue and which ones you want to refine or drop.

Our book Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day explains these steps in a lot more detail. It contains 87 different tactics that we've tested and you can use to put the steps into action. Think of it like a cookbook full of recipes. You can find the ones you like best.

As you try things out, Make Time will become a customized daily system tailored to your unique habits and routines, your unique brain and body, and your unique goals and priorities.

This page contains a few affiliate links. If you click one of these links and buy something, we may receive a small referral fee. This won't affect the price you pay, and it didn't influence our decisions about what we recommend here.

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Make Time is a friendly approach to finding focus and energy in your daily life. It's not about crushing your to-do list, optimizing every hour, or maximizing personal productivity. It's about creating time for what matters by rethinking the defaults of constant busyness and distraction.

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Share where and what you make time for.....and how you did it? We'll Still Learning

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When we create mastery in our lives, we create bandwidth to realise new potential, whilst still attracting significant returns on our initial investments.
The only way to do this however, is to ensure that we're very clear on what we choose to focus on. Initially, this will require a sacrifice of both time and effort. We will miss out on things in the beginning, to enable ourselves opportunity to train and master a specific area of expertise.

Our biggest area of sacrifice will actually be the possibilities and potential we give up across a whole range of areas in the present, to allow us to focus on something substantial, for the future. This can be very frightening because it highlights our limitations and sets us on a path where we will be tested and likely fail, along the way.

We can't do everything, however by choosing to focus on just a few things, we allow ourselves opportunity to gain mastery in these.

There is an upfront penalty to pay for creating value in our lives for ourselves, family, and within our profession. And you must pay this penalty via sacrificing opportunities and potential, which are abstract things and not real unless they're actioned. And whilst this sacrifice in confronting, there's a much bigger sacrifice if we don't.

Life accrues interest.

It hits us hard for staying small, but not immediately. If we stay small and don't make sacrifices to focus on something we want to be big at, we end up being just average, or worse, rubbish at things. Life can take chunks out of us and that can be hard to recover from and/or replace.

We need to choose our focus, which in turn identifies the areas we need to sacrifice. Although initially, we may feel disheartened as a result of the sacrifices we've made by choosing what we want to achieve levels of mastery in, appreciating what it takes in the short term and how it will create bandwidth in our lives in the long-term, should reassure us of our decision.

When we pass through an area of narrow focus and gain a level of mastery at something, it gives us a return. We get something for nothing on the other side of the hard work and sacrifice.

There's a great analogy in this practice, when we look at how red wine is created. It can take four to 10 years of tending a vine to create a good grape. But then, that grape can offer enviable returns for a further 30 to 50 years from initial investment.

This analogy reinforces that the upfront work to develop mastery in something can return us time, money and value, later on. We can now choose to double-back and rediscover some of the things we initially sacrificed. It also allows consideration around new opportunities and new possibilities, as a result of the greater bandwidth we have created in our lives.

There is truth to the statement, "we can't do everything".

However, we can do the thing we chose to master, amazingly well. We just need to search for areas of narrow greatness that can be leveraged and used as bandwidth to help us take advantage of more and more opportunities down the track.

In summary, the key to realising greater opportunities is to first sacrifice areas of potential for the reality of a dedicated focus. This allows us to strive for mastery over time, creating bandwidth to realise new potential.

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From humble beginnings growing up in Blacktown, to competing on the world stage across four Olympic Games, Since retiring from his Olympic quest for Gold in the sport of Kayaking, taking home both Silver and Bronze medals along with numerous World Championships, Dan has focused his energy on managing transformational, organisational change, driving accountability and performance in the corporate world. Dan began his thought leadership unbeknownst to him when he tested his performance concepts in the cut and thrust of elite sport within the Australian Institute of Sport, Australian Football League, National Rugby League and International Rugby. Recognising every culture is the result of the sum of the individuals involved, irrespective of title, position or hierarchy, Dan works with organisations in creating a culture of accountability and winners at all levels. Dan Collins' ongoing pursuit for excellence is nothing short of convincing.

Published By

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When we create mastery in our lives, we create bandwidth to realise new potential, whilst still attracting significant returns on our initial investments. The only way to do this however, is to ensure that we're very clear on what we choose to focus on.

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Sometimes it can feel like you're always chasing something you can't have.

It can feel like the more someone pulls away, the more you end up wanting them.

This is partly due to our vanity and self-esteem, and partly due to our warped sense of their value.

In reality, their perceived value is all in your head, and you're better off pursuing people who actually respect you enough to be honest.

It's easier said than done, though.

"Too often, the thing you want most is the one thing you can't have," said Meredith Grey in the show "Grey's Anatomy." "Desire leaves us heartbroken, it wears us out. Desire can wreck your life."

This will sound all too familiar for people who always seem to be chasing things they can't have. It might be a dream job, or it could be a person - either way, when something is out of reach, they want it that much more.

You might have started dating someone, and thought things were going well. You were attracted to each other, and you were under every impression things were progressing in the right direction. Then they started to pull away, and instead of letting them go, you started bombarding them with messages and calls.

You could feel them slipping further away, but you couldn't control that burning desire to fix whatever went wrong. Predictably, the more they distance themselves, the more you chase them, until eventually they're gone for good.

We place more perceived value on people who are busy

Erika Ettin, the founder of dating website A Little Nudge, has a theory for why we behave this way.

"The less someone responds or reciprocates to one's advances, the more perceived value the pursuer thinks this person has," she said. "So we try harder since this person must really be 'worth it' if he or she is in such high demand - in other words, this person is a scarce resource."

If someone is busy, our minds can go into overdrive thinking they must be spending time with other people. They're obviously popular, so something primal in our brain can make us think they are more valuable than they really are.

In fact, Ettin said that often this means we start to place more value on the other person than we do ourselves. But if someone isn't being honest with you, she said, they simply aren't worth your time,

"This person's lack of response, though, should not imply a higher value," she said. "Rather, at its simplest, it should imply a lack of proper communication... or just rudeness."

Unfortunately, walking away is much easier said than done. When we like someone, our brain will release the hormone dopamine when they appear in our messages, or ask to see us.

We can get hooked on this happy hormone, and start chasing the high, like a drug. If we get intermittent attention from someone, it's all the more addictive than if we got it all the time.

We are susceptible to 'breadcrumbing'

"Our brains love the unpredictability because the highs are higher than if we got the desired reward all the time," Ettin said. "This is why breadcrumbing has sadly entered our lexicon recently."

Breadcrumbing is when someone texts or calls on a sporadic basis, normally because they know you will respond. They will seem to be pursuing you, but in reality have no intention of being tied down to a relationship. They just like leaving you breadcrumbs, like a trail in Hansel and Gretel, to string you along.

Thanks to the dopamine, we let people treat us this way, because the reward feels so good on the rare occasions we get it.

"With the extra dopamine, though, comes added anxiety," she said. "'When is he going to text?' 'I haven't heard from her in three days, and I know she's back from her weekend trip by now.' 'If he wants to go out this weekend, he needs to ask since it's already Friday afternoon.' Is that a worthwhile trade-off? I say no."

It can be incredibly tempting to fall for the thrill of the chase, particularly because our vanity can drive us to keep pursuing someone who just isn't interested. But if you can pull yourself away, and devote your time and energy to what you do have rather than what you don't, you're likely to save yourself a lot of heartache in the end.

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The psychological reasons why we want what we can't have - and why we chase someone who pulls away

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Sometimes it can feel like you're always chasing something you can't have. It can feel like the more someone pulls away, the more you end up wanting them. This is partly due to our vanity and self-esteem, and partly due to our warped sense of their value.

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Tips for Decluttering your home

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Humans spend about half of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they're actually doing in the present. A now-famous Harvard study illuminated this reality, using an iPhone app that pinged participants at random times throughout the day and asked them what they were thinking about. It found that 50% of the time, their minds were wandering from their current task-not only this, but they were significantly less happy when their minds were roaming than when they were focused on the present.

This is probably because most of the time, the mind is just generating noise and gibberish-worries, memories, reenactments of the way things should have been, projections of the future. It's easy to get swept up in our thoughts, and sometimes it's kind of addictive. But it's not very pleasant, as most of us know and studies have found, and it's definitely not great for mental health over the long term. If you feel like your mind is everywhere but in the present (because of rumination, anxiety, low-grade panic, and so on), here are some of the methods that both history and science have proved actually work to pull yourself back into the present.
Breathe
This is a great method because it's one that works even if you don't believe it will. People have used breathing to calm their nervous systems over millennia, and science has just recently shown why it works, neurologically. There's a cluster of cells in the brainstem that controls different types of breathing-sighing, laughing, gasping, and others. A slow breathing subgroup was identified earlier this year, by researchers who also noted its projections to higher areas of the brain, involved in arousal and wakefulness. When the cells were knocked out in mice, the mice just chilled out; even in a novel environment, they weren't anxious or exploratory-they just sat around and licked themselves.

The study may sound funny, but it's one of the best illustrations to date of why a physiological thing would affect a mental thing so strongly. So next time you're feeling like your mind is flailing about, try some slow breathing, yogic breathing, or other breath-based relaxation technique (there are many exercises online to help). Again, this is one method that works even if your "higher" areas of the brain don't believe it.
Have a mini-interaction with nature
There's lots of evidence that spending time out in nature helps mood, well being, and stress levels. But not everyone can jaunt out to the forest when they're feeling overwhelmed. Interestingly, a new study reported that just a momentary interaction with an item of nature had a big influence on mental health.

The team had participants write about the interactions they had either with nature or man-made items over a two-week period, and the feelings those interactions inspired. Overwhelmingly, interactions with natural items were associated with positive feelings, about nature itself and about other human beings.

"This wasn't about spending hours outdoors or going for long walks in the wilderness," said study author Holli-Anne Passmore. "This is about the tree at a bus stop in the middle of a city and the positive effect that one tree can have on people." She added that the short encounters affected not just mood, but sense of elation, and perhaps most importantly, connection to other people.

So if you're having a moment of disconnect, take a little escape to walk on some grass, pet an animal, or stare at the bark of a tree. Some of these methods may look odd to passersby, but they'll help pull you out of your head and back into the present.
Meditate
This is probably one of the hardest things to make yourself do in a moment of anxiety, but it also may be the best. Though meditation has been linked to myriad neurological and psychological benefits over the long term, luckily most experts agree that even a few minutes of sitting and focusing the mind can do a lot to calm it. Mindfulness training has been shown to quiet the areas of the brain that are responsible for the chattering of the monkey mind-and within seconds. So try sitting and focusing on anything you choose-the breath; a short mantra, either in your head or aloud; the sounds in the room or outside. Every time your mind wanders (which it will, because that's what it does), simply note that, and bring it back to what you were focusing on. That's what the practice really is-redirecting our attention, again and again.
Do something physical
An extension of both breathing and connecting with nature is to do something physical-the idea is to override your internal dialogue with a physical activity. And it actually works pretty well. Take a shower, clean the house, exercise, go on a walk. Exercise of course has many added benefits-like regulating the brain's stress response and encouraging the growth of new neurons in the hippocampus-which means that anxiety and mood will be more regulated over the long-term. But any kind of physical activity will work in the short term, to yank you out of your head and back to the moment.
Objectify yourself
The subtitle is a little tongue-in-cheek, but it points to a funny aspect of being human: that we tend to think that our mind-wandering thoughts are The Truth. Too much of the time, we believe our thoughts, and react to them as ultimate reality rather than passing, random occurrences. But the reality is that most thoughts are pretty worthless. As Ajahn Amaro said to me last month, we should take the same attitude toward our thoughts that we have to the neighbor's radio or TV: You can hear it, and sometimes something relevant will pique your interest, but mostly it's just drivel that you can tune out. You don't take anything personally or listen too hard.

If we can tweak our how we relate to our thoughts (and even say to ourselves, "Oh, there my mind goes again. Silly mind."), we'll be much happier for it. A more formal way to see your thoughts somewhat more objectively is to learn how to "defuse" your thoughts through a method like acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) or cognitive behavior therapy (CBT). These two methods are intimately related to mindfulness training, and they all can be therapeutic in similar ways.
Talk to someone
Being stuck in your head can be destructive partly because there's no real order to the monologue, and no sounding board to help put things in perspective. And part of the reason that therapy, talking to a friend, and even journaling are all effective in reining in the mind is that they provide perspective-the very act of crafting your thoughts into a coherent narrative helps you understand them better. They can start to take shape, and in so doing, some of the more ridiculous worries fall away. Talk therapy has the added benefit not only of giving feedback, but also of helping you develop more concrete tools to develop a new relationship with your thoughts on your own time.
Surrender to the $%&^@#ness of it all
This is another powerful one, and it takes some practice. Bringing oneself back into the present moment requires that we accept that our current state isn't so great. But rather than be angry at its lousiness and resisting it, accepting the unpleasantness is actually more effective. Acknowledging it, and bringing awareness to exactly how it feels mentally and/or physically, actually helps it pass more quickly. It might sound counterintuitive, but both religious/philosophical traditions and modern psychology agree that noting and accepting our current (unpleasant) situation, and mentally describing it, seems to rob it of its power and makes the pain fade away more quickly.

* * *

It's worth pointing out that there are times when mind-wandering has its benefits, especially for creativity. Studies and anecdotes have pointed out that daydreaming often gives way to creative breakthroughs. But there's a difference between the productive kind of daydreaming or mind-wandering that's related to a work or personal project, and the kind that's worry-based or self-flagellating. You can tell the difference, and know when the rein in the thoughts, or let them go. Learning to "control" the mind in this way is key, and it definitely doesn't happen over night. That's why they call it a practice.

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7 Ways To Pull Your Wandering Mind Back Into The Present Moment

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Humans spend about half of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they're actually doing in the present. A now-famous Harvard study illuminated this reality, using an iPhone app that pinged participants at random times throughout the day and asked them what they were thinking about.

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Tell me if you can relate to this?

You had every intention to get one important task completed today. But urgent emails, impromptu meetings, the constant distraction of notifications and a tired brain after too much screen time last night had you choosing easier tasks all day. When you finally got to the one important task, the day was wrapping up. It wasn't your best work so you'll have to look at it again tomorrow.

And now you find yourself sitting on the couch watching a show with your partner, yet simultaneously catching up on social media posts, news, sports or other updates, all the while feeling that nagging stress of knowing you're still accountable for that work.

Sound familiar? Can you relate? And this was you before COVID-19 added to the mix of compelling distractions and worries, which has only amplified everything.

When I ask people "How are you doing with respect to finding focus these days?", I can feel the enormity of the challenge they are facing. Distraction is becoming the new normal. We're even distracted in our downtime!

What's the Problem?

Connecting with colleagues, friends and family has never been easier. This is good - right?

Media and news have never been more abundant, easier to access or as entertaining as it is today. What's not to like?

Creating your own content has never been easier; each of us can now publish, post and upload everything from comments to blogs to movies. So, what's the problem?

That's the problem! It is all too easy, abundant and entertaining.

We forget that our attention is limited and what we give it to ultimately decides where and how we are spending our life. As Matthew Crawford stated so eloquently:

"Attention is a resource - a person only has so much of it."

We also overlook what living in continuous partial attention does to our focus habits, our relationships and how it affects our moods. What seems like a way of staying on top of everything, ultimately fragments and fractures our ability to experience life. It leaves us feeling unsettled and ironically, going back to distractions in an attempt to feel better.

And we forget that the time and attention allocated to these activities came from somewhere; often time we previously gave to having greater depth and focus at work, or more connected conversations with our friends and family, or more sleep, or fully absorbed reading, or learning a new hobby, or mastering an old hobby, or exercise, or importantly - just having some much needed downtime at the end of a busy day to allow our brain time to reset for tomorrow.

Too Much of a Good Thing?

Just like overeating, I believe we can have too much of good thingwhen it comes to consuming digitally. We've been hoodwinked into thinking we need to stay on top of all of it, and that the bottomless digital world is simply benign entertainment.

Know the Game You are Playing

In his book Indistractable, Nir Eyal puts it this way, "we naively believe that we are just fiddling with fun gifts handed down from the nerd gods." The reality is that our attention is being manipulated more than we realize. The technology companies know far more about your brain than you do. They understand the precise evolutionary vulnerabilities in your brain and have become masters of how to exploit them (aka make the user experience highly engaging and enjoyable). There is a fine line between 'highly enjoyable' and 'addictive', and most of us can feel our brain dancing that line! And much of the time we simply lack the internal willpower to resist these temptations.

So, What Can You Do?

It comes down to each of us making some key decisions - "How important is it that I manage my attention?" and "What type of person do I want to be: distracted or intentional?"

1. Choose. Make a conscious choice to take back control of your attention. This is a choice that only you can make. Choose to finish writing one email before flitting off to something else. Choose what you need to focus on most at work - and stay with it. Choose to put away your phone let yourself be engrossed in a conversation, a TV show or a good book - and let that experience be enough.

2. Delete, turnoff, unsubscribe, manage your external distractions. Our digital distractions are particularly tempting, so win the war without fighting - turn it off! Turn off or remove all but your most critical notifications and updates. Starve your distractions. Feed your focus.

3. Practice JOMO/POMO. Reacquaint yourself with the word "No!" and give yourself the Joy of Missing Out (JOMO) or the Permission of Missing Out (POMO). And experience the joy of doing one thing at a time fully.

"The ability to choose cannot be taken away or even given away - it can only be forgotten!"

Greg McKeown, Essentialism - The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

See if you can pick ONE idea from this post and act on it. This will be hard but also very liberating. Stay tuned for Part 2, where I will provide more information, tips and strategies to change our behaviour.

Conclusion

We forget that our attention is one of our most precious resources. It essentially determines how we spend our life. Big dollars are spent to grab and hold our attention. And the sheer abundance of choice we have in our world today can overwhelm our attentional space.

The question is: who do you want to be? Someone whose precious attention flits around and is easily grabbed by every thought you have or every distraction you hear or see? Or someone who chooses intentionally and mindfully where you place your attention, and thus how you live your life? This is probably one of the most important questions facing each of us as we march through our days. Attention truly is a resource!

I hope these ideas help you. I also know that changing our behaviour is hard. Often very hard. So, if you are tired of the way your brain is working and this is important to you, that's where I come in.

I coach amazing people like you to delete the overwhelm, discern what matters most and drive your future. Schedule a FREE consultation with me HERE if you want to explore what life would be like for you with a more resilient brain and more masterful habits.

Please comment and share your tips on how you feed your focus and starve your distractions. We all benefit when we share and learn from each other.

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Feed Your Focus. Starve Your Distractions. Part 1 - Mindful Wisdom

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Tell me if you can relate to this? You had every intention to get one important task completed today. But urgent emails, impromptu meetings, the constant distraction of notifications and a tired brain after too much screen time last night had you choosing easier tasks all day.