Make Time

The Two Thieves

Here is a question worth sitting with for a minute. When was the last time you finished a workday and could point to one thing you actually did — one thing that mattered to you, not to your inbox, not to your Slack channel, not to a manager three time zones away? If you cannot remember, you are in good company. Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky wrote Make Time because they could not remember either, and they had reason to feel embarrassed about it. Jake had been on the Gmail team at Google. John had helped redesign YouTube around minutes watched. They built the machines that were eating everyone's afternoons, and then they noticed, with some chagrin, that the machines were eating theirs too.

Their argument starts with two villains. The first is the Busy Bandwagon — the unspoken cultural rule that says a calendar should be full, an inbox should be empty, and any minute not visibly producing is a minute that needs an explanation. The second is the Infinity Pool, a phrase the authors coined for any source of content that refills itself the moment you reach the bottom. Twitter, the news cycle, Netflix's autoplay, the email thread that never closes. Pull-to-refresh and the never-ending feed. The two thieves work together. The Busy Bandwagon keeps you reactive during the day; the Infinity Pools clean up whatever shards of attention are left in the evening. The authors note, almost cheerfully, that the average person now spends more than four hours a day on a smartphone and another four watching television. Distraction has become a full-time job.

What makes this hard is not laziness. It is that both thieves are operating as defaults — the pre-selected setting that persists unless somebody actively changes it. Notifications are on by default. Email is open in another tab by default. The TV is the centerpiece of the living room by default. Your calendar is empty for anyone to fill by default. Willpower has to fight every one of these defaults, one at a time, all day long. Willpower is going to lose. The book's central insight is that you do not fight defaults. You change them.