Sources
Jake Knapp & John Zeratsky,《Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day》, 2018。
The rules of this Skill come from the Highlight chapter and the tactics directly related to attention protection in the Laser chapter. Adapting the book's methods for personal daily life to AI Agent collaboration scenarios is this project's own design, not the original book's content.
For detailed reading notes, see references/source-notes.md。
When to use
- The day is over, you were extremely busy, but you cannot say what you accomplished
- You have several AI tasks running in the background, and your attention keeps being interrupted by notifications and results
- Your schedule is filled with meetings, messages, and other people's requests, and what you want to do yourself never gets started
- You assigned tasks to the team, but acceptance, follow-up, and scheduling are all tangled together and unclear
Start: choose today's Highlight
When you receive a task or start a new day, complete this step first before doing anything else.
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Ask yourself three questions, choose one to answer:
- What is the most urgent thing today? (urgency)
- What would make me feel most accomplished tonight after finishing it? (satisfaction)
- What would make today happier? (joy)
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Write it down. One thing, not three. Write it on paper, a sticky note, or in a calendar; as long as you can see it, that is enough.
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Give it a specific time period. Schedule it, 60 to 90 minutes. If you do not schedule it, it will be squeezed out by other things.
Deliverable: one sentence clearly stating today's Highlight + a corresponding time block in the calendar.
At work: protect your Highlight
After choosing it, you need to protect it, because two forces will eat it up.
Counter the Busy Bandwagon
Your schedule is filled by others, and you look busy, but not a single thing was chosen by you.
- Before starting the Highlight period, write down the miscellaneous tasks you are currently handling and set them aside; do not bring them in
- If someone looks for you during the Highlight period, by default reply "handle it later," unless it is truly urgent
- Keep at least one "no meetings" time block every day
Counter Infinity Pools
Endless content streams—social media, news, short videos—and a new variety in the AI era:Task boards and Agent notifications。
- Check AI tasks in a concentrated way: Package checking AI tasks into 2-3 fixed periods in the day (for example, 10 a.m., 3 p.m., and before leaving work), and check and handle them in a concentrated way. Do not check progress at other times.
- Turn off non-essential notifications: Notifications that an Agent has finished do not need real-time pop-ups. Batch processing is far more efficient than responding one by one.
- Think about the Highlight first in the morning, then open the task board: The first thing after getting up is not to see how last night's AI tasks ran, but to first decide the most important thing today.
- Watch out for the time trap: "Taking a quick look at progress" seems to take only a few seconds, but each switch costs time to re-enter a focused state. The real cost far exceeds those few seconds.
Encountering a new task at work
- If the new task is unrelated to today's Highlight, write it down and put it on tomorrow's candidate list.
- If the new task is more urgent than the Highlight, you can switch, but be sure to write down clearly, "I switched the Highlight from X to Y because Z." Don't drift away silently.
Wrap-up: a few minutes of daily review
Before the day ends, spend 3-5 minutes answering:
- Did I complete today's Highlight?
- How was my focus? (Rate it from 1-10)
- How was my energy level? (Rate it from 1-10)
- What methods did I try today? Which worked, and which didn't?
- How do I plan to adjust tomorrow?
No need to write a long essay; a few sentences are enough. The key isto turn each day into a small experiment—try a method, see how it works, keep it if it helps, and change it if it doesn't.
Deliverable: a short daily review record.
Continue reading
After using this set of rules, if you're curious about more details, you can go back to these places in Make Time:
- Highlight chapter: The book gives 16 specific tactics for choosing and protecting the Highlight, such as Groundhog It (using the same Highlight for several days in a row) and The Burner List (a minimalist list that keeps only two projects).
- Laser chapter: 44 tactics for fighting distraction, from phone settings to email management to how to enter flow.
- Reflect chapter: Why the author says "you are an experiment subject with a sample size of one," and other people's conclusions cannot replace your own experiments.