[Book Extracts] Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day – John Zeratsky, Jake Knapp

How Make Time Works

Make Time Is Just Four Steps, Repeated Every Day

The first step is choosing a single highlight to prioritize in your day. Next, you’ll employ specific tactics to stay laser-focused on that highlight—we’ll offer a menu of tricks to beat distraction in an always-connected world. Throughout the day, you’ll build energy so you can stay in control of your time and attention. Finally, you’ll reflect on the day with a few simple notes.

Highlight: Start Each Day by Choosing a Focal Point

The first step in Make Time is deciding what you want to make time for. Every day, you’ll choose a single activity to prioritize and protect in your calendar. Your Highlight might be something you do not neceesarily have to do but want to do, can contain multiple steps.

Your Highlight isn’t the only thing you’ll do each day. But it will be your priority. Asking yourself “What’s going to be the highlight of my day?” ensures that you spend time on the things that matter to you and don’t lose the entire day reacting to other people’s priorities. When you choose a Highlight, you put yourself in a positive, proactive frame of mind.

Laser: Beat Distraction to Make Time for Your Highlight

Distractions like email, social media, and breaking news are everywhere, and they’re not going away. You can’t go live in a cave, throw away your gadgets, and swear off technology entirely. But you can redesign the way you use technology to stop the reaction cycle.

Energize: Use the Body to Recharge the Brain

To achieve focus and make time for what matters, your brain needs energy, and that energy comes from taking care of your body.

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. And you’ll think back on your energy level, whether you made time for your Highlight, and what brought you joy in the day.
Over time, you’ll build a customized daily system tailored to your unique habits and routines, your unique brain and body, and your unique goals and priorities.

Highlight

What Will be the Highlight of Your Day?

We want you to begin each day by thinking about what you hope will be the bright spot. If, at the end of the day, someone asks you, “What was the highlight of your day?” what do you want your answer to be? When you look back on your day, what activity or accomplishment or moment do you want to savor? That’s your Highlight.
Your Highlight gives each day a focal point. Research shows that the way you experience your days is not determined primarily by what happens to you. In fact, you create your own reality by choosing what you pay attention to.

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Three Ways to Pick Your Highlight

Choosing your daily Highlight starts with asking yourself a question:

“What do I want to be the highlight of my day?”

Answering this question isn’t always easy, especially when you’re just beginning to use Make Time. So how should you decide? We use three different criteria to choose our Highlight.

Urgency

The first strategy is all about urgency: What’s the most pressing thing I have to do today?
Have you ever spent hours churning through email and attending meetings only to realize at the end of the day that you failed to make time for the one thing you really needed to do? If you have something that absolutely positively must be accomplished today, make it your Highlight. You often can find urgent Highlights on your to-do list, email, or calendar—look for projects that are time-sensitive, important, and medium-size (in other words, they don’t take ten minutes but don’t take ten hours, either).

Your urgent Highlight might be one of the following:
• Create a price quote and send it to a customer who’s expecting it before the end of the week.
• Request catering and venue proposals for an event you’re organizing at work.
• Prepare and cook dinner before friends come over.

Satisfaction

The second Highlight strategy is to think about satisfaction: At the end of the day, which Highlight will bring me the most satisfaction?

Here are some examples of Satisfying Highlights:
• Finish the proposal for a new work project you’re excited about and share it with a few trusted colleagues.
• Research destinations for your next family vacation.
• Draft 1,500 words of the next chapter in your novel.

Joy

The third strategy focuses on joy: When I reflect on today, what will bring me the most joy? To other people, some of your joyful Highlights may look like wastes of time: sitting at home reading a book, meeting a friend to play Frisbee in the park, even doing a crossword puzzle. Not to us. You only waste time if you’re not intentional about how you spend it. All sorts of Highlights can bring you joy.

Here are some examples:
• Going to your friends’ housewarming party
• Mastering a new song on the guitar
• Having a fun lunch wich your hilarious coworker
• Taking your kid to the playground

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Choose Your Highlight

1. Write it Down

“The things you write down are more likely to happy”

2. Groundhog it (or, “Do Yesterday Again”)

There are lots of great reasons to repeat your Highlight:
• If you didn’t get to your Highlight, it’s probably still important. Repeat for a second chance.
• If you started your Highlight but didn’t finish it or if your Highlight was part of a bigger project, today is the perfect day to make progress or start a personal sprint (#7). Repeat to build momentum.
• If you’re establishing a new skill or routine, you’ll need repetition to cement the behavior. Repeat to create a habit.
• If yesterday’s Highlight brought you joy or satisfaction, hey, there’s nothing wrong with more of that! Repeat to keep the good times rolling.

3. Stack Rank Your Life

If you’re feeling stuck choosing a Highlight or if you’re feeling a conflict between competing priorities in your life, try this recipe for ranking your big priorities:

(1) Make a list of the big things that matter in your life.
This list can include “Friends” or “Family” or “Parenting”; it can include your significant other—or, if you’re in the market for a significant other, “Dating.” Other categories to consider are health, finances, and personal growth.
• Including only big stuff and try to use one- or two-word titles (this keeps the list high level)
• Don’t prioritize the list yet, just write it.

(2) Choose the one most important thing.
This is easier said than done, but you can do it! Here are some tips:
• Consider what’s most meaningful to you, not what is most urgent.
• Think about what needs the most effort or work. For example, exercise might be very important, but if you already have a strong habit in place, you might shift your focus elsewhere.
• Follow your heart. For example, you might think you should put “Work” ahead of “Fiddle lessons” but you really wish you could make the fiddle your top priority. Well, do it!
• Don’t sweat it—this list isn’t set in stone. You can always make a new stack rank next month, next week, tomorrow, or even later this afternoon.

(3) Choose the second, third, fourth, and fifth most important things.

(4)Rewrite the list in order of priority.

(5) Draw a circle around number one.
If you want to make progress on your number one priority, you’ll need to make it your focus whenever possible. Drawing the circle reinforces this prioritization—there’s something symbolic about putting your decision in ink.

(6) Use this list to help you choose Highlights.
Keep this list around to remind yourself of your one highest priority—and to break ties between two activities when you’re not sure how to spend your effort.

4. Batch the Little Stuff

Bundle up the small tasks and use batch processing to get them all done in one Highlight session. In other words, make a batch of small things your big things.

These small tasks may not sound like Highlight material—no one wishes they could make time for email—but there’s a surprising satisfaction that comes from catching up. And when you catch up all at once instead of constantly trying to keep your inbox or to-do list empty, you supercharge that feeling of satisfaction.

5. The Might-Do List

My solution to the to-do-list problem is to separate the decision about what to do from the act of doing it. I call my approach the Might-Do List. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a list of things you might do. Projects sit on your Might-Do List until you decide to make them your Highlight and schedule them on your calendar. Here’s how the pieces fit together

6. The Burner List

The Burner List is intentionally limited. It forces you to acknowledge that you can’t take on every project or task that comes your way. Like time and mental energy, the Burner List is limited, and so it forces you to say no when you need to and stay focused on your number one priority.

Here’s how to make one:
(1) Divide a sheet of paper into two columns.
Create two columns on a blank sheet by drawing a line down the middle. The left-hand column is going to be your front burner, and the right-hand column your back burner.

(2) Put your most important project on the front burner
You are allowed to have one and only one project, activity, or objective on the front burner. Not two, not three—just one.
In the top left-hand corner, write the name of your most important project and underline it. Then list the to-dos for that top project. This should include any task you can do in the next few days to move the project forward.

(3) Leave some counter space
Leave the rest of the first column empty. It might be tempting to fill the space with every task you can think of, but the Burner List is not intended to fill the paper’s surface area efficiently; it’s intended to make good use of your time and energy. The blank space gives you room to add more tasks for the top project as they come up, but just as important, extra visual space makes it easier to focus on the important stuff.

(4) Put your second most important project on the back burner
At the top of the right-hand column, write the name of your second most important project and underline it, then list the related to-dos underneath.

The Burner List is disposable and gets scrapped every time I cross off a few finished to-dos. I generally “burn” through a list every few days and then re-create it over and over. This act of re-creating the list is important. It allows me to discard some unfinished tasks that no longer matter, and it also allows me to reconsider which projects belong on the front and back burners right now. Sometimes it’ll be a work project that gets the high-priority spot, and sometimes it’ll be a personal project. It’s okay and natural for things to shift. What’s important is there can only be one front burner project at a time.

7. Run a Personal Sprint

Whenever you begin a project, your brain is like a computer starting up, loading relevant information, rules, and processes into your working memory. This “boot up” takes time, and you have to redo it to a certain extent every time you pick up the project.

8. Schedule Your Highlight

If you want to make time for your Highlight, start with the calendar. Like writing down your Highlight (#1), this tactic could hardly be simpler:
• Think about how much time you want for your Highlight.
• Think about when you want to do your Highlight.
• Put your Highlight on the calendar.

When you schedule something, you’re making a commitment to yourself.

9. Block Your Calendar

If you start with an empty calendar, you can schedule your Highlight for the ideal time, when your energy is highest and your focus is at its peak. But for most of us, starting the day with a blank calendar is about as likely as finding a thousand-dollar bill on the sidewalk: It certainly could happen, but we’d better not count on it. And if you work in an office where colleagues can add meetings to your calendar, forget about it. You’ll have to take a different approach: Use daily “do not schedule” blocks to make room for your Highlight.

10. Bulldoze Your Calendar

If you can’t block your calender, there’s another way. toclear time for your Highlight: Bulldoze it.

Imagine a tiny bulldozer driving through your calendar, pushing events around. The bulldozer might compress one meeting by fifteen minutes and another by thirty. It might shove your one-on-one from the morning to the afternoon or push your lunch back by half an hour so you can get a full two hours of Highlight time. The bulldozer could even stack all your meetings on one or two days of the week, freeing up the other days for solo work.

11. Flake It Till You Make It

Bailing is not a good long-term strategy; over time, you’ll get a feel for how many commitments you can take on while still making time for your Highlight. But in the meantime, it’s better to ruffle a few feathers than to always push your priorities off for “someday.” Go ahead and flake out. Don’t feel bad. And if people complain, just tell them we said it was okay.

12. Just Say No

Blocking, bulldozing, and flaking are great ways to make time for your Highlight. But the best way to get out of low-priority obligations is never to accept them in the first place.
For the two of us, saying no doesn’t come naturally. We’re the kind of people who default to yes. This is partly niceness—we wish we could do it all, and we want to be helpful. And to be honest, it’s partly a lack of guts. It’s much easier to say yes. Saying no to an invitation or a new project can feel uncomfortable, and we’ve lost many hours, days, and weeks of Highlight time because we didn’t have the courage to decline a commitment up front.

In short, be nice but honest. Over the years, we’ve heard about many tricky techniques for deflecting requests, making up excuses, or deferring indefinitely, and we’ve tried some of them. But they don’t feel good, and they’re not honest. Worse, they just delay the hard decision until a later time, and those half choices can weigh you down, sticking to you like barnacles on the hull of a boat. So ditch the tricks, shed the barnacles, and tell the truth.
Just because you’re saying no to this request doesn’t mean you can’t say yes in the future. Again, say it only if you mean it. “I really appreciate the invitation, and I’d love to hang out another time.” Or “It means a lot that you’d ask for my help, and I hope we can work together in the future.

13. Design Your Day

When we ran our design sprints for Google Ventures, we planned each day hour by hour and even minute by minute. Every sprint was another opportunity to perfect our formula. We kept track of the ebbs and flows of work throughout the day—when people’s energy dipped, when things moved too fast or too slow—and adjusted accordingly.
Blocking your calendar and scheduling your Highlight is a great way to start making time. But you can take this proactive, intentional mindset to another level by learning from our sprints and designing your entire day. JZ has been doing this for years, structuring the time in his calendar like this:

14. Become a Morning Person

Giving yourself something to do in the morning will help you wake up early, but for me it’s also why I wake up early. Even on the days when I don’t work on my daily Highlight first thing in the morning, I still find reasons to make time in those predawn hours. Exercise is a great morning activity. Even doing dishes, ironing shirts, or straightening up around the house helps me wake up and feel productive before the day has started.
However, even with light, coffee, and something to do, it’s tough to wake up early without making some adjustments to your evening routine.

Becoming a morning person is not for everyone. Some people will have more success making time at night. Still, it’s worth giving it a shot. After all, I didn’t know I could be a morning person until I tried.

15. Nighttime Is Highlight Time

16. Quit When You’re Done

It can be hard to stop work at the end of the day, because the Busy Bandwagon encourages a “just one more thing” mentality. One more email. One more to-do. Many people quit only when they’re too exhausted to go on, and even so, they check email again before they go to bed.

When should you quit? Instead of trying to answer every email (not happening) or finish every task (dream on), you need to create your own finish line. Perhaps you can find a perfect time of day to stop—in our design sprints, we used 5 p.m. as our cutoff.
Or you can use your Highlight. As quitting time approaches, think about whether you accomplished your Highlight. If you have, you can rest knowing you made time for the day’s most important job. No matter how much you did or didn’t get done or how many hours you did or didn’t work, you’ll be able to look back on the day with a sense of joy, accomplishment, or satisfaction—or all three!
And if you didn’t finish your Highlight, you (hopefully) had to bump it for some unforeseen super important project. If that’s the case, you can still feel satisfied knowing you did something urgent and necessary. Good job! Now let yourself ignore that inbox and call it a day.

Laser

Distraction is the enemy of Laser mode. It’s like a giant disco ball in the path of your laser beam: Light goes everywhere except in the direction of the target. When that happens, you can easily end up missing out on your Highlight.
We don’t know about you, but the two of us get distracted. A lot. We get distracted by email. We get distracted by Twitter. We get distracted by Facebook. We get distracted by sports news, political news, tech news.

17. Try a Distraction-Free Phone

Removing email and other Infinity Pool apps from our phones might be the simplest, most powerful change we’ve made to reclaim time and attention. We’ve both had distraction-free phones since 2012, and not only have we survived, we’ve thrived—becoming more effective in our work and just generally enjoying our days more.

How to set up your own distraction-free phone:
(1) Delete social apps
(2) Delete other Infinity Pools
(3) Delete email and remove your account
(4) Remove the Web browser

18. Log Out

Typing in your username and password is a hassle, so websites and apps make sure you don’t have to do it very often. They encourage you to stay logged in, leaving the door to distraction wide open.

19. Turn off Notifications

Notifications are not your friends. They’re nonstop attention thieves. Whether or not you try a distraction-free phone, you should at the very least turn off almost all notifications.

20. Clear Your Home-screen

To slow things down, try making your homescreen blank. Move all the icons to the next screen over (and from the second screen to the third and so on). Don’t leave anything behind on that first screen except a nice clean view of your beautiful background image.

A blank homescreen provides a tiny moment of quiet every time you use your phone. It’s an intentional inconvenience, a small pause—a speed bump keeping distraction one step away. If you unlocked your phone reflexively, a blank homescreen offers you a moment to ask yourself, “Do I really want to be distracted right now?

21. Wear a Wristwatch

A wristwatch replaces the need to check your phone whenever you want to know the time. And if you’re anything like us, a quick time check on your phone often pulls you into an Infinity Pool, especially when there’s a notification on the screen. If you wear a watch, you can keep your smartphone out of sight. And when it’s out of sight, it’s easier to ignore.

22. Leave Devices Behind

Leaving your devices behind is a helpful tactic when you want to make time for an “offline” Highlight like reading to your kids or working on a project with your hands. But if leaving your phone at work sounds terrifying (or if you have a legitimate need to use it, like for emergency contact), you can apply the underlying principle of device separation with less extreme methods. Instead of keeping your phone by your side when you get home, put it in a drawer or on a shelf; better still, stow it in your bag and shut your bag in the closet.

23. Skip the Morning Check-In

When you wake up in the morning, whether you slept for five hours or ten, you’ve had a nice long break from the Busy Bandwagon and the Infinity Pools. This is a golden moment. The day is fresh, your brain is rested, and you have no reason to feel distracted yet. No news items to stress about, no work emails to stew over.

Savor it. Don’t reach for email, Twitter, Facebook, or the news right away. It’s very tempting to do a check-in first thing in the morning and get the latest updates; after all, something in the world always changes overnight. But as soon as you fire up that screen, you start a tug-of-war of attention between the present moment and everything out there on the Internet.

24. Block Distraction Kryptonite

Most of us have one especially powerful Infinity Pool we just can’t resist. We call it “distraction Kryptonite.”

There are a number of ways to block Kryptonite, depending on how serious you want to get and how serious your addiction is. If your Kryptonite is a social network, email, or anything that requires a password, logging out might be enough to slow you down (#18). If your Kryptonite is a specific website, you can block it or turn off the Internet altogether during your Laser time (#28). To step it up, you can remove the app or account or browser from your smartphone (#17).

25. Ignore the News

The whole concept of breaking news runs on a very potent myth: You need to know what’s going on around the world, and you need to know now. Smart people follow the news. Responsible people follow the news. Grown-ups follow the news. Don’t they?

We’ve got some breaking news of our own: You don’t need to follow the daily news. True breaking news will find you, and the rest isn’t urgent or just doesn’t matter.

26. Put Your Toys Away

Now picture this: You grab your laptop, flip open the screen, and then…you see a beautiful photograph on your desktop and nothing else. No messages. No browser tabs. You signed out of email and chat at the end of the day yesterday, confident that if something urgent came up overnight, someone would call or text you. The silence is blissful. You’re ready to rock.

Reacting to what’s in front of you is always easier than doing what you intend. And when they’re staring you right in the face, tasks such as checking email, responding to a chat, and reading the news feel urgent and important—but they rarely are. If you want to get into Laser mode faster, we recommend putting your toys away.

27. Fly Without Wi-fi

One of our favorite things about airplanes (apart from the sheer wonder of flying through the air) is the enforced focus. During a flight, there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do, and even if there were, the seat belt sign requires you to keep your butt in your chair. The strange parallel universe of an airplane cabin can be the perfect opportunity to read, write, knit, think, or just be bored—in a good way.

28. Put a Timer On the Internet

There are many software tools for temporarily blocking the Internet. You can find browser extensions and other apps to limit your time on specific sites or to disable everything for a predetermined length of time. New versions of these tools come out all the time; you can find our favorites on maketimebook.com.
Or you can cut off your Wi-Fi at the source. Just plug your Internet router into a simple vacation timer (the kind you use to trick would-be thieves by turning on the lights when you’re out of town) and set it to click off at 6 a.m., 9 p.m., or whatever time you want to get into Laser mode to work on your Highlight.

29. Cancel the Internet

Canceling your Internet is not quite as extreme as it sounds, because you can still get online by using your phone as a hotspot. But that’s slow-ish and expensive-ish and a big hassle. As Chryssa puts it, “That requires me to tinker with settings on two devices, and that small deterrent is enough to leave it off 99 percent of the time.”
Intrigued but not quite ready to cancel your service altogether? To try this tactic without complete commitment, ask a brave friend to change your Wi-Fi password and keep it secret from you for twenty-four hours.

30. Watch Out for Time Craters

A tiny tweet can easily smash a thirty-minute crater in your day, and that’s without switching costs. Each time Jake leaves Twitter and returns to his Highlight, he has to reload all the context into his brain before he’s back in Laser mode.9 So that time crater might actually be forty-five minutes, an hour, or even more.
But it’s not just Infinity Pools that create time craters. There’s also recovery time. A “quick” fifteen-minute burrito lunch might cost an extra three hours of food coma. A late night watching TV might cost you an hour of sleeping in and a whole day of low energy. And there’s anticipation. When you don’t start your Highlight because you’ve got a meeting coming up in thirty minutes, that’s a time crater, too.
Where are the time craters in your life? That’s up to you to figure out. You can’t avoid them all, but you can definitely dodge some of them, and every time you do, you’ll make time.

31. Trade Fake Wins for Real Wins

Like time craters, fake wins come in all shapes and sizes. Updating a spreadsheet is a fake win if it helps you procrastinate on the harder but more meaningful project you chose as your Highlight. Cleaning the kitchen is a fake win if it burns up time you intended to spend with your kids. And email inboxes are a never-ending source of fake wins. Checking mail always feels like an accomplishment even when there’s nothing new. “Good,” says your brain. “I’m on top of things!”
When it’s time for Laser mode, remind yourself: Your Highlight is the real win.

32. Turn Distractions into Tools

Infinity Pools like Facebook, Twitter, email, and the news are distractions, but that doesn’t mean they’re without value. We all started using them for a reason. Sure, at some point, a habit took hold and checking those apps became our default. But underneath the automatic routine, there’s some real utility and purpose for every Infinity Pool app. The trick is to use them purposefully, not mindlessly.
When you focus on an app’s purpose, you can change your relationship to it. Instead of reacting to a trigger, prompt, or interruption, you can proactively use your favorite apps—even distracting Infinity Pools—as tools.
Here’s how:
(1) Start by identifying why you use a particular app. Is it purely for entertainment? Is it to keep in touch with friends and family? Is it to stay updated on certain kinds of important news? And if so, is it actually adding value to your life?
(2) Next, think about how much time—per day, per week, per month—you want to spend on that activity. And consider whether this app is the best way to accomplish it. For example, you might use Facebook to keep in touch with family, but is it really the best way to do that? Would you be better off calling them?
(3) Finally, consider when and how you’d like to use that app to achieve your goal. You might realize that you can read the news once a week (#25) or save email for the end of the day (#34). You might decide to give up Facebook except for sharing baby pictures. Once you decide, many of the Make Time tactics can help you put your plan into action by restricting your access at other times.

33. Become a Fair-Weather Fan

Sports fandom doesn’t just take time; it takes emotional energy. When your team loses, it sucks—it might bum you out and lower your energy for hours or even days.10 Even when your team wins, the euphoria creates a time crater (#30) as you get sucked into watching highlights and reading follow-up analysis.
Sports have a powerful grip on us. They satisfy an innate tribal urge. We grow up watching local teams with our parents, families, and friends. We discuss sports with colleagues and strangers. Each game and season has an unpredictable story line, but (unlike real life) they all finish with clear-cut win-or-lose outcomes that we find deeply gratifying.
We’re not asking you to give it all up. We simply suggest that you step over to the dark side by becoming a fair-weather fan. Watch games only on special occasions, like when your team is in the playoffs. Stop reading the news when they’re losing. You can still love your team yet spend your time on something else.

34. Deal with Email at the End of the Day

Instead of checking your email first thing in the morning and then getting sucked in and reacting to other people’s priorities, deal with email at the end of the day. That way, you can use your prime hours for your Highlight and other important work. You’ll probably have a little less energy at the end of the day, but that is actually a good thing when it comes to email: You’ll be less tempted to overcommit by saying yes to every incoming request and less likely to bang out a multipage manifesto when a simple reply would do.

35. Schedule Email Time

To help establish a new end-of-day email routine, try putting it on your calendar. Yes, we want you to literally add “email time” to your calendar. When you know you’ve got time set aside later, it’s easier to avoid wasting time on email now. And if you schedule your email time before a firm commitment such as a meeting or leaving the office, you’ll get an additional boost: When email time is done, it’s done. Do as much as you can in the allotted time, then move on.

36. Empty Your Inbox Once a Week

We like the clarity of an empty inbox, but we don’t like the daily time commitment. JZ makes an empty email inbox a weekly goal: As long as he gets to everything by the end of the week, he’s good. Give it a try. You can still skim your inbox for messages that really require a faster response, but respond only to those. For other urgent issues, you can ask your friends and family to contact you via text or phone. And for nonurgent ones, your colleagues (and everyone else) can learn to sit tight and wait for a reply. (See tactic #39 for tips on resetting communication expectations.)

37. Pretend Messages Are Letters

A lot of email stress comes from thinking you need to constantly check and immediately respond to every new message. But you’re better off treating email like old-fashioned paper letters—you know, the kind with envelopes and stamps. Snail mail gets delivered only once a day. Most letters sit on your desk for a while before you do anything about them. And for 99 percent of communications, that works just fine. Try slowing down and seeing your email as what it really is: just a fancy, dressed-up, high-tech version of regular old mail.

38. Be Slow to Respond

Above all, taking control of your inbox requires a mental shift from “as fast as possible” to “as slow as you can get away with.” Respond slowly to emails, chats, texts, and other messages. Let hours, days, and sometimes weeks go by before you get back to people. This may sound like a total jerk move. It’s not.
In real life, you respond when people talk to you. If a colleague says, “How’d the meeting go?” you don’t stare straight ahead and pretend you didn’t hear. Of course not—that would be super rude. In real-life conversations, answering right away is the default. And it’s a good default. It’s respectful and helpful. But if you take the “answer right away” default into the digital world, you get in trouble.
Online, anyone can contact you, not just the highly relevant people in your physical vicinity. They have questions about their priorities—not yours—when it’s convenient for them—not you. Every time you check your email or another message service, you’re basically saying, “Does any random person need my time right now?” And if you respond right away, you’re sending another signal both to them and to yourself: “I’ll stop what I’m doing to put other people’s priorities ahead of mine no matter who they are or what they want.

39. Reset Expectations

Of course, when you limit your email time or increase your response time, you may need to manage the expectations of your colleagues and others. You could say something like this:
“I’m slow to respond because I need to prioritize some important projects, but if your message is urgent, send me a text.”
This message can be conveyed in person, via email, or even as an autoresponse or signature. The wording is carefully designed. The justification “I need to prioritize some important projects” is eminently reasonable and sufficiently vague. The offer to respond to text messages provides an in-case-of-emergency plan, but because the threshold for texting or calling is higher than it is with chat and email, you’ll probably be interrupted much less often.

40. Set Up Send-Only Email

Although not receiving email on your phone is wonderful, sometimes it’s still useful to have the ability to send email. Good news: You can have your cake and eat it, too.

41. Vacation Off the Grid

Have you ever received an “out of office” email response like this?
“I’m on vacation this week, off the grid without access to email, but I’ll reply to your message when I return.”
The sentence conjures the image of some remote adventure: a desolate desert landscape, a frozen forest in the Yukon, or perhaps some spelunking. But it doesn’t actually say the person is in an isolated location with no cell towers. It just says she or he isn’t accessing the Internet for a week.
You can say the exact same thing when you go on vacation, no matter where you’re going. You can choose to go off the grid. It can be hard, because most workplaces have an implicit (and crazy) expectation that you’ll check email during your time off. But even if it’s hard, it is usually possible.
And it’s worth the effort. Laser mode matters when you’re on vacation. More, maybe, because vacation time is so limited and precious. It’s the perfect time to delete your work email app (#24) and leave your laptop behind (#22). You can—and should—go off the grid anywhere and take a real vacation.

42. Lock Yourself Out

For some (cough, cough, Jake) email is simply irresistible. You might look at these strategies and want to implement them but find you don’t have the willpower. But there’s still hope: You can lock yourself out of your inbox.

43. Don’t Watch the News

If you make only one change to your viewing habits, cut the news. TV news is incredibly inefficient; it’s an endless loop of talking heads, repetitive stories, advertisements, and empty sound bites. Rather than summarizing the most important events of the day, most TV news offers up anxiety-provoking stories handpicked to keep you agitated and tuned in. Instead, make a habit of reading the news once per day or even once per week (see #25).

44. Put Your TV in the Corner

Living rooms often are arranged around the television to make watching the default activity. Like this:

Instead, rearrange the furniture so that looking at the television is a bit awkward and inconvenient. This way, the default activity becomes conversation. Like this:

45. Ditch Your TV for a Projector

Next time you’re in the market for a television, consider buying a projector and a fold-up projection screen instead. It’s a cheaper way to get a big cinemalike display. It’s also a pain in the ass to set up every time you want to watch. This hassle is, of course, a good thing, because it switches the default to off. You’ll want to bring out the projector only for special occasions. And when you do, the viewing experience will be giant and awesome! It’s the best of both worlds: a great viewing experience sometimes and more free time the rest of the time.

46. Go à la Carte Instead of All-You-Can-Eat

The trouble with streaming subscriptions is that there’s always something on. It’s like having an all-you-can-eat buffet of distraction in your living room at all times. Try canceling cable, Netflix, HBO, Hulu, and the like, and instead rent or buy movies and episodes one at a time.14 The idea is to change your default from “let’s see what’s on” to “do I really want to watch something?” It sounds drastic, but it can be a temporary experiment. If you want to go back, they make it very easy to sign up again.

47. If You Love Something, Set It Free

You don’t have to give up television, but if you find it hard to reduce your hours, you might want to get extreme and try going cold turkey for a month. Unplug the TV, put it in the closet, or take it to a storage locker ten miles away and hide the key. Do whatever you have to do—just go without for a month. When the month is up, think about everything you did with that extra time and decide how much of it you want to give back to your TV.

48. Shut the Door

“If your Highlight requires focused work, do yourself a favor and shut the door. If you don’t have a room with a door, look for one you can camp out in for a few hours. And if you can’t find one, put on headphones—even if you don’t actually put on any music.
Headphones and closed doors signal to everyone else that you shouldn’t be interrupted, and they send a signal to you, too. You’re telling yourself, “Everything I need to pay attention to is right here.” You’re telling yourself it’s time for Laser mode.

49. Invent a Deadline

Nothing’s better for focus than a deadline. When someone else is waiting expectantly for results, it’s a lot easier to get into Laser mode.
The trouble is that deadlines are usually for things we dread (like doing taxes), not for things we want to do (like practicing the ukulele). But this is an easy problem to solve. You can invent a deadline.
Invented deadlines are the secret ingredient in our design sprints. The team schedules customer interviews on Friday of every sprint week so that starting on Monday, everyone knows the clock is ticking. They have to solve their challenge and build a prototype before Thursday night; after all, those strangers are showing up on Friday! The deadline is totally made up, but it helps teams stay in Laser mode for five straight days.
You, too, can create a deadline that will help you make time for something you want to do. Register for a 5K run. Invite your friends over for a homemade pasta dinner before you’ve learned how to make it. Sign up to exhibit at an art show before you’ve painted the pictures. Or you can simply tell a friend what your Highlight is today and ask them to hold you accountable for getting it done.

50. Explode Your Highlight

When you’re not sure where to start, try breaking your Highlight into a list of small, easy-to-do bits. For example, if your Highlight is “Plan vacation,” you can explode it into bits like these:
• Check calendar for vacation dates.
• Skim guidebook and make list of possible destinations.
• Discuss destinations with family and choose favorite.
• Research airfare online.

Note that each item includes a verb. Each one is specific. And each one is small and relatively easy. We learned this technique from productivity shaman David Allen, who has this to say about breaking projects into physical actions: Shifting your focus to something that your mind perceives as a doable, completable task will create a real increase in positive energy, direction, and motivation.

51. Play a Laser Sound Track

If you’re struggling to get into Laser mode, try a cue.
A cue is any trigger that causes you to act consciously or unconsciously. It’s the first step in the “habit loop” Charles Duhigg describes in The Power of Habit: First, a cue prompts your brain to start the loop. The cue triggers you to perform a routine behavior without thinking, on autopilot. Finally, you get a reward: some result that makes your brain feel good and encourages it to run the same routine again the next time you encounter the cue.
Many cues exist in our environment and trigger not-so-great behaviors, such as the smell of French fries that lures us into double cheeseburger debauchery. But you can create your own cue to help kick off a good habit, like Laser mode.

52. Set a Visible Timer

Time is invisible. But it doesn’t have to be.
The Time Timer is a special clock designed for children. You set an interval from one to sixty minutes, and a red disk slowly disappears as time elapses. When it gets to zero, the timer beeps. It’s very simple. It’s pure genius—it makes time visible.
If you use the Time Timer when you’re getting into Laser mode, you’ll feel an instant, visceral sense of urgency in a totally good way. By showing you that time is elapsing, the Time Timer will get you to focus on the task at hand.

53. Avoid The Lure of Fancy Tools

What’s the best to-do-list app? The most exquisite notepad and pen for taking notes and sketching? The finest smartwatch?
Everyone has their favorites. The Internet is home to many a treatise about the Best This or the Cool New Way to Do That.16 But this obsession with tools is misguided. Unless you’re a carpenter, a mechanic, or a surgeon, choosing the perfect tool is usually a distraction, yet another way to stay busy instead of doing the work you want to be doing.
It’s easier to set up fancy writing software on your laptop than to actually write the screenplay you’ve been dreaming of. It’s easier to buy Japanese notepads and Italian pens than to actually start sketching. And unlike checking Facebook—which everyone knows isn’t productive—researching and messing with fancy tools feels like work. But it usually isn’t.
Plus, it’s easier to get into Laser mode when you adopt simple tools that are readily available. That way, when something breaks, or your battery dies, or you forget your gadget at home, you won’t miss a beat.

54. Start on Paper

In our design sprints, we found that we did better work when we turned off our laptops and used pens and paper instead. And the same is true for your personal projects.
Paper improves focus, because you can’t waste time picking the perfect font or searching the Web instead of working on your Highlight. Paper is less intimidating, too—while most software is designed to guide you through a series of steps that will lead to a finished product, paper allows you to find your own way to a cohesive idea. And paper opens up possibilities, because whereas Word is designed for lines of text and PowerPoint is designed for graphs and bullet points, on paper, you can do anything at all.
Next time you’re struggling to get into Laser mode, put away your computer or tablet and pick up a pen.

55. Make a “Random Question” List

It’s natural to feel twitchy for your phone or browser. You’ll wonder if you have any new email. You’ll feel a burning desire to know Who was that actor in that movie?
Instead of reacting to every twitch, write your questions on a piece of paper (How much do wool socks cost on Amazon? Any Facebook updates?). Then you can stay in Laser mode, secure in the knowledge that those pressing topics have been captured for future research.

56. Notice One Breath

Pay attention to the physical sensations of a single breath:
1. Breathe in through your nose. Notice the air filling up your chest.
2. Breathe out through your mouth. Notice your body softening.
You can repeat this if you like, but one breath really can be enough to reset your attention. Paying attention to your body shuts up the noise in your brain. And even a pause that lasts only one breath can bring your attention back to where you want it—on your Highlight.

57. Be Bored

When you’re deprived of distraction, you may feel bored—but boredom is actually a good thing. Boredom gives your mind a chance to

“wander, and wandering often leads you to interesting places. In separate studies, researchers at Penn State and the University of Central Lancashire found that bored test subjects were better at creative problem solving than were their nonbored peers.19 So next time you are feeling understimulated for a few minutes, just sit there. You’re bored? Lucky you!

58. Be Stuck

Being stuck is a tiny bit different from being bored. When you’re bored, you don’t have anything to do, but when you’re stuck, you know exactly what you want to do—your brain just isn’t sure how to proceed. Maybe you don’t know what to write next, or where to begin on a new project.
The easy road out of Stucksville is to do something else. Check your phone. Dash off an email. Turn on the TV. These things are easy, but they cut into the time you’ve made for your Highlight. Instead, just be stuck. Don’t give up. Stare at the blank screen, or switch to paper, or walk around, but keep your focus on the project at hand. Even when your conscious mind feels frustrated, some quiet part of your brain is processing and making progress. Eventually, you will get unstuck, and then you’ll be glad you didn’t give up.

59. Take a Day Off

If you’ve tried these techniques and you still don’t have Laser mode in you, don’t beat yourself up. You might need a rest day. Energy—especially creative energy—can fluctuate, and sometimes you need time to replenish it. Most of us can’t take the day off work whenever we want, but you can give yourself permission to take it easy. Try taking real breaks throughout the day (#80) and switching to a joyful Highlight that’ll help you recharge.

60. Go All In

Wholeheartedness is complete commitment, holding nothing back. It’s letting go of caution and allowing yourself to care about your work, a relationship, a project, anything. Throwing yourself into the moment with enthusiasm and sincerity.
We believe wholeheartedness is fundamental to everything this book is about: presence, attention, and making time for what matters. And Brother David’s case for wholeheartedness is a new (for us, at least) way of approaching Laser mode.
Of course, both physical rest and mental rest are extremely important. But if you’re feeling worn out and unable to focus, Brother David says you don’t always need to take a break. Sometimes, if you go all in and embrace the current task with wild abandon, you may find it becomes easier to focus. You may find the energy is already there.
This sounds like a radical idea, but we’ve seen it happen. We’ve seen teams in a design sprint get the chance to work in a wholehearted way—finally focusing on a project they really care about—and become filled with energy. And we’ve felt it ourselves.

Wholeheartedness is not easy. It’s especially difficult when you’re reacting to Infinity Pools or the Busy Bandwagon. And if you’re used to “playing it cool,” it may take some practice before you can let your guard down and let yourself be enthusiastic again.
But perhaps the biggest obstacle is when your heart isn’t really in the current task—for example, when you’re working at a job that’s not right for you. In fact, that’s the context for Brother David’s quote: He was advising a friend who was burned out at work to leave and focus on his passion. We aren’t advising you to quit your job, but we are reminding you that it’s important to be proactive and seek out moments when you can be passionate about your efforts. If you choose exciting ways to spend your time, being wholehearted isn’t so hard.

Energize

61. Exercise Every Day (but Don’t be a Hero)

Making the shift to daily doable exercise might mean giving up bragging rights. It might mean letting go of the ideal activity in favor of the workout you can actually do consistently. Making this mental shift is tough. We can’t do it for you, but we can give you permission: It’s okay to not be perfect. There is more to you than how you sweat.

62. Pound the Pavement

A daily walk doesn’t have to be “one more thing to do.” Try substituting walking for your usual mode of transportation. If the distance is too far, maybe you can walk part of the way. Jump off the bus or train one stop early and make the rest of the journey on foot. Next time you drive somewhere with a big parking lot, skip the search for the perfect spot and park far away. If you change the default from “ride when possible” to “walk when possible,” you’ll see opportunities everywhere.

63. Inconvenience Yourself

(1) Cook Dinner
Carrying groceries, moving around the kitchen, lifting, chopping, stirring—it all requires moving your body. For some, cooking is meditative; it’s a great way to make time for thinking or reflecting. For others, it’s genuinely enjoyable and an excuse to spend face time with friends and family (#81). Plus, the food you’ll make at home is probably healthier than restaurant food and therefore more energizing.

(2)Take the Stairs
Elevators are super convenient, but they’re kind of awkward, right? Which direction do you look? Should you say hi to the guy from accounting or keep your eyes glued to your phone? Spare yourself these stress-inducing decisions, keep it moving, and take the stairs.

(3) Use a Suitcase Without Wheels
Ditch the rolling suitcase and carry your stuff instead. Think of it as a miniature strength workout, but at the airport instead of the gym. You get the idea. There are opportunities to be inconvenienced everywhere!

64. Squeeze in a Super Short Workout

The best part is that super short workouts are truly energizing. And it’s not just a time-saving substitute for “real” exercise. In fact, there’s evidence that high-intensity exercise is better overall than the longer medium-intensity workouts we all think are necessary. Summarizing several new scientific studies, the New York Times says: “Seven minutes or so of relatively punishing training may produce greater gains than an hour or more of gentler exercise.” Greater gains, in less time, for no money, with no equipment: It really does sound too good to be true.

The 7 Minute Workout

JZ’s 3×3 Workwout

65. Eat Like a Hunter-Gatherer

This tactic is an unabashed homage to and rip-off of our hero Michael Pollan, a food enthusiast and author. In his bestselling book In Defense of Food, Pollan addressed the “supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy”:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

66. Central Park Your Plate

One simple technique to keep meals light and energizing is to put salad on your plate first, then add everything else around it. It’s just like Central Park in New York City: You’re reserving a big piece of territory for greens before you develop around the perimeter. More salad means less heavy food and, most likely, greater energy after eating.

67. Stay Hungry

The point is that just because we can eat all the time, that doesn’t mean we should. Even though we’re lucky enough to live in a world of abundant food, our bodies are still the same as Urk’s, evolved to survive and thrive in a world where food was scarce.
Intermittent fasting has become a bit of a fad, but there are lots of reasons to try it beyond the endorsements of Beyoncé and Benedict Cumberbatch. Food tastes better when you’re hungry, and there are some great health benefits from fasting: cardiovascular fitness, longevity, muscle development, and maybe even reduced cancer risk.
But when it comes to energizing and making time, one benefit tops them all: Fasting (to a point) makes your mind clear and your brain sharp, which is great for staying focused on your priorities.

68. Snack Like a Toddler

To keep your battery charged, pretend you’re a toddler or, more accurately, the parent of a toddler. Look out for crankiness and frustration and be prepared with a nutritious remedy. When you leave home in the morning, pack a little trail mix or an apple. If you find yourself hungry and snackless, seek out real food (e.g., bananas or nuts) instead of junk food (candy or chips).

69. Go on the Dark Chocolate Plan

Sugar causes sugar highs, and sugar highs cause sugar crashes. Most people know that avoiding sugary treats is a great way to keep your energy up, but let’s face it, it can be pretty hard to stop eating desserts.
So don’t stop. Instead, switch your default. Allow yourself to have dessert as long as it’s dark chocolate.
Dark chocolate has way less sugar than most other treats, so you’ll get less of a crash. Many studies suggest that dark chocolate even has health benefits. And because it’s rich and delicious, you won’t have to eat as much to satisfy your craving. In short, dark chocolate is freaking awesome and you should have it more often.

70. Wake Up Before You Caffeinate

In the morning, your body naturally produces lots of cortisol, a hormone that helps you wake up. When cortisol is high, caffeine doesn’t do much for you (except for temporarily relieving your caffeine addiction symptoms). For most folks, cortisol is highest between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m., so for ideal morning energy, experiment with having that first cup of coffee at 9:30 a.m.

71. Caffeinate Before You Crash

The tricky thing about caffeine is that if you wait to drink it until you get tired, it’s too late: The adenosine has already hooked up with your brain, and it’s hard to shake the lethargy. We’ll repeat that because it’s a crucial detail: If you wait until you get tired, it’s too late. Instead, think about when your energy regularly dips—for most of us, it’s after lunch—and have coffee (or your caffeinated beverage of choice) thirty minutes beforehand. Or, as an alternative…

72. Take a Caffeine Nap

One slightly complicated but high-yield way to take advantage of caffeine mechanics is to wait till you get tired, drink some caffeine, then immediately take a fifteen-minute nap. The caffeine takes a while to be absorbed into your bloodstream and reach the brain. During your light sleep, the brain clears out the adenosine. When you wake up, the receptors are clear and the caffeine has just shown up. You’re fresh, recharged, and ready to go. Studies have shown that caffeine naps improve cognitive and memory performance more than coffee or a nap alone does.

73. Maintain Altitude with Green Tea

To keep a steady energy level throughout the day, try replacing high doses of caffeine (such as a giant cup of brewed coffee) with more frequent low doses. Green tea is a great option. The easiest and cheapest way to run this experiment is to buy a box of green tea bags and try substituting two or three cups of tea for every cup of coffee you’d normally have. This keeps your energy level more consistent and steady throughout the day, avoiding the energy peaks and valleys you get from something super caffeinated like coffee.

74. Turbo Your Highlight

Life is a lot like the video game Mario Kart: You’ve got to use your turbo boosts strategically. Try to time your caffeine intake so that you’re wired right when you start your Highlight. Both of us apply this technique in the same simple way: We make a cup of coffee just before we sit down to write.

75. Learn Your Last Call

Jake’s friend Camille Fleming is a doctor of family medicine who trains resident physicians at Swedish Hospital in Seattle. One of the most common complaints she hears from patients of all ages is difficulty sleeping. The first question she asks them—and the question she trains her students to ask—is “How much caffeine do you consume, and when?” Most people don’t know the answer. Others say something like “Oh, that’s not what’s keeping me up; I have my last cup of coffee at 4 p.m.”
What most people (including us before Camille explained it to Jake) don’t realize is that the half-life of caffeine is five to six hours. So if the average person has a coffee at 4 p.m., half the caffeine is out of the bloodstream by 9 or 10 p.m., but the other half is still around. The upshot is that at least some caffeine is blocking at least some adenosine receptors for many hours after you have caffeine and very possibly interfering with your sleep and in turn the next day’s energy.
You’ve got to experiment to figure out your own unique “Last Call for Caffeine,” but if you have trouble sleeping, your last call might be earlier than you think. Experiment with cutting yourself off earlier and earlier and note if and when it becomes easier to fall asleep.

76. Disconnect Sugar

It’s no secret that many caffeinated drinks are also very sugary: soft drinks such as Coke and Pepsi and sweetened drinks like Snapple teas and Starbucks mochas, not to mention turbocharged energy drinks such as Red Bull, Macho Buzz, and Psycho Juice.11 But although sugar provides an immediate rush, you don’t need us to tell you that it isn’t good for sustained energy.
We’re realists, and we won’t tell you to cut sugar out of your diet entirely (we sure haven’t). But we do suggest you consider separating the caffeine from the sweets.

77. Get Woodsy

A little exposure to nature can make you measurably calmer and sharper. How does this work? The best explanation we could find comes from Cal Newport in Deep Work:

When walking through nature, you’re freed from having to direct your attention, as there are few challenges to navigate (like crowded street crossings), and experience enough interesting stimuli to keep your mind sufficiently occupied to avoid the need to actively aim your attention. This state allows your directed attention resources time to replenish.

In other words, the forest recharges the battery in your brain. Maybe it strikes a chord with our Urk ancestry. Whatever the explanation, it’s worth a try, and you don’t have to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. Heck, you don’t even need a forest; the benefits seem to start with any natural surroundings. Just experiment with spending a few minutes in a park and take note of what it does for your mental energy. If you can’t get to the park, step outside for a breath of fresh air. Even if you just crack a window, we predict you’ll feel better. Our hunter-gatherer bodies feel more alive outdoors.

78. Trick Yourself into Meditating

The benefits of meditation are well documented. It reduces stress. It increases happiness. It recharges your brain and boosts focus. But there are problems. Meditation is difficult, and you might feel a little silly doing it. We get it. We still feel embarrassed when we talk about meditation. In fact, we are embarrassed right now as we type these words. But meditation is nothing to be ashamed of. Meditation is just a breather for your brain.

For human beings, thinking is the default position. Most of the time this is a good thing. But constant thinking means your brain never gets rest. When you meditate, instead of passively going along with the thoughts, you stay quiet and notice the thoughts, and that slows them down and gives your brain a break.

So okay, meditation is rest for your brain. But here’s the crazy thing: Meditation is also exercise for your brain. Staying quiet and noticing your thoughts is refreshing, but ironically, it’s also hard work. The act of slowing down and noticing your thoughts is exertion that leaves you invigorated, just as exercise does.

In fact, the effects of meditation look a lot like the effects of exercise. Studies show that meditation increases working memory and the ability to maintain focus. Meditation even makes parts of the brain thicker and stronger, just as exercise builds muscle.
But meditation is, as we said, hard work. And it can be hard to stay motivated when the results, unlike with exercise, aren’t outwardly visible: Your cortex might bulk up, but you can’t meditate your way to six-pack abs.

79. Leave Your Headphones at Home

Headphones are awesome. They’re easy to take for granted, but the power they give us to listen to anything, anywhere, in complete privacy is nothing short of amazing. You can take Malcolm Gladwell on a jog, crank up Joan Jett while you work, or listen to a Dungeons & Dragons podcast while you sit on a crowded airplane. Nobody has to know what you’re listening to. It’s your own little universe, in stereo.

So, of course, a lot of modern life is spent wearing headphones to fill space in the day that otherwise might be quiet. But if you put on headphones every time you work, walk, exercise, or commute, your brain never gets any quiet. Even an album you’ve listened to a million times still creates a bit of mental work. Your music, podcast, or audiobook prevents boredom, but boredom creates space for thinking and focus (#57).

Take a break and leave your headphones at home. Just listen to the sounds of traffic, or the clack of your keyboard, or your footsteps on the pavement. Resist the itch to fill the blank space.

We’re not saying you should give up on headphones altogether. That would be pretty hypocritical, because we use them ourselves almost every day. But an occasional headphone vacation for a day or just an hour is an easy way to put some quiet in your day and give your brain a moment to recharge.

80. Take Real Breaks

It’s awfully tempting to check Twitter, Facebook, or another Infinity Pool app as a break from work. But these kinds of breaks don’t renew or relax your brain. For one thing, when you see a troubling news story or an envy-inducing photo from a friend, you feel more stressed, not less. And if you work at a desk, Infinity Pool breaks keep you glued to your chair and away from energy-giving activities like moving around and talking to other people.
Instead, try to take breaks without screens: Gaze out the window (it’s good for your eyes), go for a walk (it’s good for your mind and body), grab a snack (it’s good for your energy if you’re hungry), or talk to someone (it’s usually good for your mood unless you talk to a jerk).
If your default break is to check an Infinity Pool, you’ll have to change your habits—and changing habits, as we’ve noted, is hard. We’ve found that these “speed bump” tactics you’ve already read about can help: Keep a distraction-free phone (#17), log out of addictive websites (#18), and put your toys away when you’re done (#26). But once you start taking breaks in the real world, we think you’ll love them. With more energy, it’s easier to get back into Laser mode and sustain focus on your Highlight.

81. Spend Time with Your Tribe

All of us, even the most introverted, have a hardwired need for human connection.

But today face-to-face time can be hard to come by. If you live in a city, you probably saw more humans yesterday than Urk saw in his entire life, but how many of them did you talk to? And how many of those conversations were meaningful? It’s a cruel irony of modern life that we’re surrounded by people yet more isolated than ever. This is a big deal, especially if you consider the findings from Harvard’s 75-year Study of Adult Development: People with strong relationships are more likely to live long, healthy, fulfilling lives. We’re not claiming that talking to strangers in the grocery store checkout line will help you live to be 100—but spending time with people face-to-face can be a big energy booster.

Even in the twenty-first century, you have a tribe. If you work in an office, you have colleagues. In your family, you might have siblings, parents, kids, and/or a significant other. And you (we hope) have friends. Sure, those people might annoy you or frustrate you sometimes, but more often than not, spending time with them is energizing.

82. Eat Without Screens

When you eat without screens, you hit three of our five Energize principles at once. You’re less likely to mindlessly shovel unhealthy food in your mouth, you’re more likely to have an energizing face-to-face conversation with another human, and you’re creating space in your day to give your brain a rest from its constant busyness. And all this while doing something you have to do anyway!

83. Make Your Bedroom a Bed Room

For Urk, bedtime would have marked the end of an hours-long process to remove mental stimuli gradually and shift into sleep. When you look at social media, email, or the news before bed, you sabotage this process. Instead of winding down, you’re revving your brain up. An annoying email or distressing news story can make your mind race and keep you awake for hours.

If you want to improve your sleep, keep the phone out of your bedroom—at all times. And don’t stop there. Remove all electronic devices to transform your bedroom into a true sanctuary for sleep. No TVs, no iPads. No Kindles with backlights. In other words: Make your bedroom a bed room.
Television presents its own challenges. A TV in your bedroom offers a very tempting path of least resistance. You don’t have to do anything to be entertained—it does all the work!

Reading in bed is a wonderful alternative, but paper books or magazines are best. A Kindle is okay, too, because it’s not loaded with apps and other distractions; just make sure to turn off the bright white backlight.
It can be tough to keep devices out of the bedroom, but it’s easier to change your environment than to rely on willpower to change your behavior. Do it once and make it permanent: Physically remove the TV. Unplug your smartphone charger and get its stand or base out of your bedroom.

There’s probably one device you’ll need to keep in your bedroom: an alarm clock. Choose a simple model with a screen that’s not too bright (or without a screen if you don’t mind the ticking). If possible, put your alarm clock on a dresser or shelf across the room. This will keep the light away from your eyes, and it’ll help you wake up: When the alarm sounds, you’ll have no choice but to get out of bed, stretch your legs, and switch it off. We think that’s a better way to start your day than snuggling with your smartphone.

84. Fake the Sunset

When we see bright light, our brains think, “It’s morning. Time to wake up!” This is an ancient and automatic system.

If you often feel lethargic or low-energy in the morning, try faking the sunrise, too. In recent years, automatic “dawn simulator” lights have become smaller and cheaper thanks to improved LED technology and a healthy market of people who hate winter mornings. The idea is simple: Before the alarm sounds, a bright light gradually turns on, simulating a perfectly timed sunrise and tricking your brain into waking up. If you combine that with turning down the lights in the evening, it’s the next best thing to living in a cave.

85. Sneak a Nap

Napping makes you smarter. Seriously. Lots of studies14 show that napping improves alertness and cognitive performance in the afternoon. As usual, we’ve tested the science ourselves.

You don’t even have to fall asleep. Just lying down and resting for ten to twenty minutes can be a great way to recharge.
But the truth is that it’s really hard to take a nap if you work in an office. Even at offices with fancy nap pods (we’ve worked in them), most people don’t feel like they have time to nap, and let’s face it, pod or no pod, it can still feel very awkward to sleep at work. If you can’t sleep on the job, consider napping at home. Even if you only nap on the weekend, you’ll benefit.