Becoming a Certified Time Dork.
By: Max Angenius
Tags: Energy, Time, Time Management, Focus

Photo by Morgan Housel on Unsplash

This post was originally posted 10th of March 2020 on my personal blog.

Over the past few weeks, I have participated in an online course called The Highlight Course. It is a course created around the framework and book called Make Time written by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, the same authors that wrote the book Sprint which is about the Design Sprint method. Make Time is a framework that contains four steps and roughly 80 tactics to start with. The four steps are Highlight, Laser, Energize and Reflect and every step has its own set of tactics. You are encouraged to pick and mix between different tactics and experiment with them to understand how you can design your time in your life and focus on what matters to you. You may replace some tactics after a few days and some might stick with you indefinitely. It is up for you to decide and reflect on how they are working for you. You can also create personal tactics beyond the book or customize the ones from the book to fit your need because what the tactics are is just a bunch of habits that the authors have tried out and suggest that we also can try.

From the Make Time Blog: “Make Time is not about crushing your to-do list, optimizing every hour, or maximizing personal productivity. It’s about creating time for your priorities by rethinking the defaults of constant busyness and distraction.”

One of my favorite things with Make Time is that it is created to not be perfect. It is expected that our life is not perfect and that it is alright. Instead of giving you a set of tools and a list you need to follow to the letter, you can experiment and learn. Experiments are never guaranteed to succeed. But what is guaranteed is that you learn from it and then you can tweak it an try again or try a different experiment. There is no pressure, instead, there is the freedom to design your time based on your terms, context, and interests. It is a long-term sustainable approach to managing life and what matters to us.

From the Make Time Blog: “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.”

I read Make Time during the fall of 2019 and during the fall I experimented with a few of the tactics, but nothing stuck in the long-term. To be honest, I didn’t commit to it 100% even though I liked the idea. But I have since I read both Make Time and Sprint become a big fan of Jake’s and John’s writing style and approach to life. This prompted me to sign up for the course when I heard about it. The first real online course I ever invested in.

The Highlight Course is a 4-week program where Jake and John dive deeper in the Make Time framework and invite you to join a global community to discuss and learn how to make time for what matters every day. Every week we were given a topic to focus on, a set of educational videos and assignments to complete, reflect about and then share our thoughts in the community. Going through each step of the framework and different tactics. Every week also included a live Q&A discussion between the community (course participants), Jake and John. Yesterday (9th of March) was graduation day and I am thrilled to call myself a Certified Time Dork, and I am ready to make time for what matters and use the tools I learned from The Highlight Course, the Make Time book and to continue sharing the results of my experiments with the awesome community that was founded during this course.

I have during every day of the course been choosing a Highlight which is my main priority and the main thing I want to spend time on that specific day. Some of the things that have been my Highlight are Meeting with my Mental Coach, Swimming practice, The Live Q&A with the Highlight Course, Record a vlog, Play Dungeons and Dragons with friends, Lunch seminar with one of my favorite podcasters and End-presentation with a project at work. The goal of setting a Highlight has been to make sure I spend at least 60–90 minutes on a chosen Highlight every day. Choosing a Highlight each day is a great way to make sure I make progress on the things that matter to me.

To make sure that the 60–90 minutes I spend on my Highlight, and the rest of the time during that day, is efficient I use tactics to Laser focus my attention. Understanding what distracts me and limit that has been a key for this to happen. I started last fall by removing Instagram and Email from my smartphone, during the time I read the Make Time book. This has been gradually increasing as I have removed more and more distractions from my smartphone. Recently I removed Facebook, LinkedIn and some of the other social media applications. The coup de grâce, the death-blow, was delivered during The Highlight Course where I removed Facebook Messenger, YouTube, Google and Google Chrome from my smartphone. Now my phone is plain and boring in the sense that it won’t grab my attention unless I need it as a tool. I use it for meditation, fasting, music and podcasts, bank errands, GPS and a few other things. One week after I removed the last of the row of applications that draw my attention I had reduced my smartphone usage with 47%, going from an average of 3 hours per day to 1,5 hours. I feel that I am letting go of the need of having my smartphone around at all times and being on top of the newest messages, videos or content. There are other Laser tactics that I want to experiment with, but so far the tactics regarding social media, email and screen time have been easiest to implement and try out (also Jake and John forced us to do it 😂).

To be able to stay focused and efficient, it is important to Energize. Making sure that I have time to recover and recharge my batteries is essential for long-term success in my life and in using the Make Time framework. It is a core part of the idea. Making sure I am making time for movement, food, sleep, social interaction, calm and quiet, and also thinking about my caffeine intake. Designing my days and weeks in a way that these things fit in the schedule, sometimes even prioritizing them by making them a Highlight. Committing to a life where being healthy is just as important as being efficient.

Finally, we have the last step, and it is to Reflect on the tactics I try or experiments in trying to make time in my life. This has been the hardest part for me. Ironically, I have the potential for improvement in making time for reflection about my day and experiments. The purpose of reflection is to evaluate what is working and what is not working. Maybe I experimented with waking up early every day for a period, I took a lunch walk or increased my amount of meditation sessions from 1 to 2 during a week. Through the reflection of the results, I can understand what worked and what didn’t and in turn make a decision to continue or swap out tactics/habits. This a very important step that is easy to forget as your days go by.

Highlight + Laser + Energize +Reflect = Make Time

All in all, this course has been awesome! It has been a great boost and addition to the Make Time book. I have loved to hear more about what Jake and John think and how they approach their lives and how they approach time. It has been great to participate in the live Q&A:s, asking questions directly and sharing stories. Surprisingly, the most amazing thing has been the community that has been formed around this. Having a place to talk to other people around the globe about the challenges in life and reading how others overcome their challenges or learn from a failed experiment is cool. I am very happy that the community around the course will continue forward after the course and I look forward to learning together with the people in the community.

Huge thanks to John and Jake for creating such an amazing book and online course. Thanks to the community manager Julie for being all-around great. Thanks to all the members of the community for going all in and sharing both successes and failures. While there are so many interesting things to talk about, such as specific tactics that I am loving or experimenting with or what I choose to focus on or use as energizers, I will end this post here. If it is not obvious, I highly recommend you read Make Time: How To Focus On What Matters Every Day because it might change your life… one experiment at a time.