Press Releases
MAKE TIME by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky
How to Focus on What Matters Every Day
MAKE TIME
Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky
- Imprint: Currency
- On sale: September 25, 2018
- Price: $27
- Pages: 304
- ISBN: 9780525572428
212-572-2076
jenlee@penguinrandomhouse.com
From the New York Times bestselling authors of Sprint, a simple 4- step system for improving focus, finding greater joy in your work, and getting more out of every day
“A charming manifesto—as well as an intrepid do-it-yourself guide to building smart habits that stick. If you want to achieve more (without going nuts), read this book.”
—Charles Duhigg, bestselling author of The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better
“In today’s fast-paced, technology-saturated world, readers are sure to glean insights from this powerful book.”
—Booklist, STARRED review
“This is a charming, highly usable guide to trimming out unnecessary distractions from one’s life and focusing on what’s important.”
—Publishers Weekly
We all struggle to make time for what matters. We start each day with the best intentions—but then the hours get swallowed up by back-to-back meetings, endless email chains, and the infinite stream of social media updates. And it’s getting harder to make time for our priorities, with distracting new devices and apps appearing every day. In a world where information refreshes constantly and the workday feels like a race to react to other people’s priorities, frazzled and distracted has become our default state.
What if you could step off the hamster wheel and start taking control of your time and attention?
Enter Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky. They were designers in the tech industry who became obsessed with the idea of redesigning time. A decade later, after countless personal experiments and feedback from thousands of fellow “time dorks,” they’ve turned their results into a daily framework and a new book: Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day (Currency; Hardcover; 9/25/18; $27.00).
As the creators of Google Ventures’ renowned “design sprint” process, Jake and John have helped hundreds of teams solve important problems by redesigning the workweek. Their first book, Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days (2016), became a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into more than 20 languages. Around the world, teams are using design sprints to focus on what matters at work. Now the authors are turning their attention to personal, everyday life drawing on the same principles to help us make time for the things we care about—at home, with friends, family, as well as at work, both in our day job and in the projects we do on the side. Their system revolves around four simple steps, repeated every day—Highlight, Laser, Energize, Reflect—that anyone can use to systematically design their days. But Make Time is not a one-size-fits-all formula. Rather, it offers a customizable menu of more than 80 bite-size tactics that can be tailored to individual habits and lifestyles.
Jake and John have a unique perspective, having helped design some of the stickiest (and . . . ahem . . . most distracting) apps on the planet. They know how today’s technology is engineered to keep us coming back for more, but their experience also gives them insight into how to resist the allure. They’ll be the first to tell you that avoiding distraction can’t be achieved through sheer willpower alone. But their approach isn’t anti-technology, and it doesn’t require swearing off smartphones or completely overhauling your lifestyle. Instead, Make Time is about making small and sustainable shifts to our default habits and our environments.
Jake and John have experimented with changing these defaults for a decade. Jake spent a full year tracking his daily energy levels in a spreadsheet, trying to understand whether he should drink coffee or green tea, whether he should exercise in the morning or evening, and even whether he liked being around people (the answer: yes . . . mostly). And what began as a crazy experiment with a distraction-free iPhone has become a lifestyle for 6 years and counting. John started reading the news only once a week and reprogrammed his sleep schedule, shifting from a night owl to a morning person who finds focus before sunrise. He experimented with organizing his to-do list using everything from the fanciest productivity apps to a pad of post-its, and from eating six small meals a day, to just two large ones. They tried all these things so we don’t have to.
For Jake and John, the results have been transformative. And through their newsletter, Time Dorks, they’ve reached hundreds of thousands of others who’ve seen equally dramatic success. Now, with Make Time, they’ve collected all their best tips and tactics in a fun, illustrated, and easy-to digest guide.
Whatever you want time for, Make Time can help you get it – whether that’s eating dinner with family, learning a language, starting a side business, volunteering, writing a novel, or mastering Mario Kart. Moment by moment and day by day, you can make your life your own.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky are the authors of the New York Times bestseller Sprint and the creators of Time Dorks, a popular newsletter about experiments in time management. Jake spent 10 years at Google and Google Ventures, where he created the design sprint process. He has coached over 150 companies on the process, including teams at Slack, Uber, the New York Times, and LEGO. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and sons. John has written for the Wall Street Journal, Time, Harvard Business Review, Wired, Fast Company, and many more publications. For nearly 15 years, he was a designer at technology companies, including YouTube and Google Ventures. Originally from Wisconsin, John and his wife now live aboard their sailboat, Pineapple.