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How do you make time for what matters? In this episode, we share a simple habit called The Highlight Method, inspired by the Design Sprint, that we both use to focus our efforts on the most important activities every day. Have a question for us? Send it to hey@jakeandjz.com.
This week on episode 8 of Jake & JZ, we talked about:
- When it makes sense to use LLMs for writing
- Being secret late adopters
- The big ideas behind our book Make Time
- The danger of defaults in our everyday lives
- How the daily Highlight works
- Strategies for choosing the right Highlight
📩 Get an email about every episode at JakeAndJZ.com
💸 Learn more about our seed fund at Character Capital
Creators and Guests
What is Jake & JZ?
Weekly podcast about startups, design, marketing, technology… and anything else we’re thinking about. 🤓
Hosted by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, co-founders of Character Capital and bestselling authors of Sprint and Make Time.
Jake (00:00)
you, using something new, some new tech that I want to hear about. was working with you on some kind of writing project and you had written something. It does sound mysterious. Well, it is mysterious. It's a secret writing project, but.
JZ (00:11)
which sounds extremely mysterious.
Yeah, yeah, it is. And
as of yet unreleased, unannounced writing project.
Jake (00:22)
Yes, yes,
But you had written something that I thought was quite good and I complimented you on it. And you said, well, I used Gemini. What's your experience like with that?
JZ (00:31)
Yeah.
Well, that was the first time that I had used it Well, I should say, okay, was the first time I had used Gemini or any LLM to help with writing in any way. have used various of the like chat LLM products essentially as like a Google alternative to, varying degrees of success. Like I, I've been using perplexity a little bit.
and I've used Chat GPT, of course, but it's always to answer a question. think a lot of the ways that people are initially introduced to those tools is like, hey, tell me about this or whatever. And it's pretty good. I think Google is keeping up pretty well with the AI summaries. know if everybody sees those, but at least when I do a Google search, I see an AI summary at the top that's quite good, quite helpful.
I have in the past, with various LLM tools for writing, but never like for real. I was never, never had like a real project. was, was like, what would it do if I asked for an outline of a blog post or, know, some like sort of typical use, but it was always like, not good. was like super underwhelming. And I realized that usually me, the challenge is not like how to write it. It's what to say.
Jake (01:42)
Right.
JZ (01:56)
And I, because I like to write, I've written a lot. studied journalism. I've, you we've written a couple of books together. I've written a lot. I've done a lot of editing. So the, to write it, the way to structure it and the words to use, like my jam. Like that's something that I, I like doing. I'm really good at. so the hard part for me is like, well, what am I trying to say? What's the point I'm trying to say here? So I don't, I have not found a lot of success with like AI writing tools for that reason.
this particular writing project, was, we had to write something that is like not a thing that we normally write. So just adding layers upon layers to the enigma of what this is, like it wasn't like a blog post. It wasn't like a LinkedIn post. It wasn't a description for the podcast. wasn't an email newsletter. it was not a format of a thing that I'm accustomed to writing. And so.
Jake (02:32)
Thanks.
And it's a suggestion.
It's a suggestion for someone else. We were, were suggesting like, Hey, here's something we think you should say. Here's what you should say.
JZ (02:51)
Yeah, to make it even more weird. That's a really good
point. Yes, that is a really good point. So here's what I wanted. I wanted it. I wanted some help writing in this format that I am unaccustomed to writing in. That's the first, that was the first requirement. And the second requirement was in somebody else's style. to give them a kind of a suggested thing that they might use, or at least take as a starting point. So I had, I happened to have just
signed up for Gemini because I got a marketing email from Google. I was like, okay, I'll try it. I generally like Google products and so I'll check it out. So I just literally had it open in a tab on my computer. Totally coincidence. And I was like, okay, all right, first thing, I'm going to give Gemini description of a thing that I want this writing to be based on.
And then I'm going to give it some examples of the person that it's supposed to emulate. And then I said, like, give me, give me three or four examples of this thing in the style of this person. it was interesting. They were, they were pretty decent. thing I really enjoyed about Gemini that I have not seen in other tools is you can like copy part of the response text and then you can like edit it yourself. And then it like takes the edits that you made and like,
learns from those. So there was a few words where was like, I would never use those words. Like I'm going to change them. I'm going to make them simpler. And then I like regenerate and regenerate. And I didn't use any of those things wholesale, but there were a couple of really good like nuggets. There were a couple of really good phrases, like five word phrases. And I think one of the ones that you really liked was verbatim. One of those five word phrases that I just like, like plucked and like added a little bit before it and a little bit after it. so.
It was pretty cool. It was pretty interesting.
Jake (04:42)
It sounds like you did do some work to craft that. Perhaps even more work than had you done it by yourself.
JZ (04:48)
Yeah.
Yeah. It felt easier. It felt like I got to a better result faster, but I, yeah, to your point, I don't actually know if that's true.
Jake (05:00)
think one of my big problems so far with using the various LLM tools has been exactly what you described, underwhelming results. And I suppose I haven't put in the work to try and train it. And I suppose it's partly that putting in that work is not yet so trivial. It would be nice. I think what I dream of, and I'm sure this is coming, is the thing that just sort of watches me, for example, doing email, and then is like, okay.
JZ (05:28)
Yeah.
Jake (05:29)
I've got it. think I know how you do email. I'm going to kind of take care of this for you. And then you review what I did before we hit send on the 300 emails you need to reply to. And, and, and also taking care of the ancillary tasks around those. So, you know, I think, I think it's, it's a, a, it's a giant new universe and you've, you've, you've put your toe in there and now I think I've, maybe I need to, I need to take my socks off.
JZ (05:43)
That would be nice, yeah.
Well, the thing that's sort of secret reveal of this discussion is that I am oftentimes sort of a late adopter. And I think you are as well, not universally, because I think there are, we've talked on earlier episodes about how you will buy new gadgets when they come out, even pre-release, you'll pre-order them. And there's things like,
Jake (06:05)
Me too.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
JZ (06:24)
Like AI note takers, know, like we've talked about how we, before we invested in Fathom, we used it as a product. We loved it as a product. So that's an example of something that we adopted early. But I would say in general, if you had to like, had to classify me and it's weird because, you know, we're investors, we're VCs and we're supposed to be like on the cutting edge of everything. So maybe we shouldn't admit this, but I think in general, like.
I'm probably more of a late adopter persona, more of like a little bit skeptical and really focused on like, it actually useful? Like, let's set aside whether it's like neat and like technologically impressive, is it actually useful? so that has driven my attitudes toward LLMs, plus the fact that I just really do genuinely enjoy writing. I haven't, that is not a problem that I need solving necessarily until it was.
Jake (07:18)
Well, it's, it's a way that I understand things is by writing about them. So I don't want to rob myself of having to form an understanding. And, and I also think there's too much that the AI writing tools that I think a lot of people are using now. A lot of times you can kind of tell, you know, you read stuff and you're like, don't think this was just words. So,
JZ (07:25)
Yeah. Right.
Yeah, totally.
Jake (07:48)
Okay. Well, should we record a podcast? All right, let's do it.
JZ (07:50)
I think we should. Let's do it.
Welcome to episode eight of Jake and Jay Z, our weekly podcast about startups, design, technology, marketing, writing, LLMs, AI, whatever else we're thinking about. That's Jake over there. I'm Jay Z. We are the founders of Character Capital. We're the authors of Sprint and Make Time. And this is our podcast. If you want to get our weekly newsletter with a link to the latest episode and a few other.
cool things we found in the meantime, you can go to jakeandjz.com and sign up for that. And I do have a favor to ask, which is that if you are, well, I was going to say if you're listening to this, or if you're watching this, you obviously are. If you're enjoying it, please stop for a moment, open whatever app you're using and subscribe. We are, we're in the early days of this thing and we want to make sure that it as many people as possible. So.
That's just a quick request for a favor from us. We really appreciate it.
Jake (09:13)
Well, today we were thinking about a topic in advance and one thing for change. Yeah. And one thing that kind of rolls right off of the, the Gemini conversation is, is how you make use of time. And we've been thinking about maybe jumping into our book, make time and sharing a couple of tactics from, from that book.
JZ (09:19)
for a change.
Yeah.
Jake (09:41)
and going into just a little bit of detail about how they work so that if you're listening to this era and you've, you've heard about make time, you know, and maybe, maybe you even read it. Great. Thank you. if you found some of the tactics useful, then maybe this would be like a little bit of a refresher. I always need reminders on it because I, I slip and slide and need to reconsider how I'm spending my time and attention. And, and if you haven't heard about it, then it'll be a little bit of an introduction to.
to some of our favorite methods for it. But first, John, could you explain like what the Make Time book is for people?
JZ (10:19)
Yeah, make time is a book that we wrote. It came out in 2018 and it's about system that we created that we use in our day to day lives to help us spend more time on the things that really matter to us and less time getting distracted and pulled off and do a million different directions. It's or spiritually related to the work that we do in sprints because it's all about.
focusing on the right things, the most important things and minimizing the distractions from everything else. it's a little bit of a side project. It's not about how to build products. It's not about how to grow a startup. It's not about how to design things. I mean, I guess it is. It's about how to design your time. It's about how to design your days and perhaps at some level design your life. it's something that we have, you and I,
talked about and geeked out about like even before like the design sprint, like I guess we didn't talk about it before the design sprint, but I know that we were, we were each individually like trying to figure this stuff out, going back to, know, the early two thousands in our own careers. And when we met, it was one of the first things that we, we connected on one of the first things that we had in common that we were both interested in. So we've been talking about this for a very long time. And then, after spring came out, we, we saw.
a bit of a window to write a book about it. so, yeah, that was Make Time.
Jake (11:49)
Yeah, it's, it's this combination. think of both of us had a long-term interest. I've been interested in, I guess, the world of like productivity and efficiency and you know, that kind of stuff since early 2000s. Well, I think since the moment that I became a dad, that was a big trigger for me was having a kid and trying to figure out how to, how to handle all of the
JZ (11:59)
Yeah.
Jake (12:15)
stuff that I needed to do at work. I was working at Microsoft. was overwhelmed there by having this job that I hadn't really, I hadn't really studied the right things to be a product designer. So I was trying to figure that out and, and also trying to figure out being a dad. And, and so this was my, one of my approaches was like, well, I'm going to, I'm going to trust in, you know, David Allen to show me the way like red.
JZ (12:26)
Yeah.
Jake (12:41)
getting things done like a thousand times and had all the folders and followed everything to the letter. And then, you know, found the, for me, the extent to which that, that did and didn't help. And then started doing my own experiments. And that just kind of continued had to be a renewed version of that. When I went to Google where again, I was not properly prepared for the job I was doing and felt overwhelmed and, and was trying to do everything. And then as we started doing design sprints and as I met you and as we were doing them full time,
think this shift started to happen where I realized the productivity hamster wheel, the like, get everything done, empty your inbox, be on top of everything. To the extent that that is even possible to do, there is not so much a pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. Like you spin the hamster wheel faster and it spins faster and you know, you.
JZ (13:34)
.
Jake (13:36)
empty out your inbox faster and people send you more emails faster because they, they know now that you're an email machine. And that's not necessarily where I want it to be. I don't think that's where you want it to be. And when we had the opportunity to run these design sprints where we could control a team of people for a week, you know, we were, yeah, we, right. We were like, suddenly we were not, not in the, the, the classic sense of like, you know,
JZ (13:39)
You
Yeah.
control them. Sounds great.
No, of course,
Jake (14:04)
I'm the
CEO and I have the vision for what you're doing as a business. But like we did control, we were the boss of them essentially for like, from, 10 AM to 5 PM for the whole week.
JZ (14:13)
Yeah, we could create the
environment that they were working in for that one week. was like, give us this week, like, please place your trust in us. Like we're going to shape this environment that you're working in and we'll see what happens.
Jake (14:18)
Yeah.
We were like the summer camp counselors and the, you know, first grade teachers and the, you know, CEO coaches, I guess, all in one, all those things at the same time. And I, I think what happened is we started doing that. So we realized, well, if you change some things about the way people work, it, changes. Dramatically what feels like success in a day, what feels.
productive in a day, what feels like I'm doing the right things. I'm paying attention to what matters. And I realized, I think we realized together that like, gosh, there's these defaults. There's these default ways that we operate, all of us operate. And those defaults often don't make sense. The ways that most teams, most companies spend their time. You know, I worked at Microsoft, we'd worked at Google. Like we'd worked inside these large organizations where
The calendar rules your day and you're going from meeting to meeting to meeting to meeting and your messages are just constantly overflowing your inbox and your phone and whatever. then working with startups, my expectation was, well, they're not going to be suckered in by that. know, they're, they're going to, these are these smart, sophisticated teams who are doing things in a brand new way. They're not going to have those same defaults. And yet they did. mean, those defaults were there too. They're.
calendars were jam packed, their messages were overflowing. And, and so this
JZ (15:57)
That was sort of a pattern
that we both saw. When we moved from, I know you went from Microsoft to Google and then to Google Ventures working with startups. I worked at a startup before Google. I worked at this company called Feedburner that was acquired by Google. During each of these leaps, it was like, this new place, they're going to totally have it figured out. I'm going to Google, for sure they know how to do it.
Jake (16:21)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
JZ (16:27)
I'm going to go to these startups. They for sure know how to do it. And every time we were like, wait a second, they bring the same habits with them because they bring the defaults with them because by nature, they're defaults. They're not these examined conditions. They're just the way things are. And most people don't really think about defaults. And that was, think, a big insight for us that kind of
Once we realized that a lot of these behaviors were not necessarily intentional, that they were just default behaviors. And we're like, if we can like change the environment that changes the defaults, that will lead to different behaviors that will be good for everyone.
Jake (17:07)
Yeah.
And we get into this situation where we're following defaults, all of us, right? Like you, me, Microsoft, Google, startup A, startup B, startup C. Everybody gets into this situation, not because we're dumb, you know, not because we're like idiots, but because we want to be helpful. We want to help our colleagues do the work that we're all in it together to do. And we.
want to make the best use of our time. And what logically makes sense is to then see what your colleagues are up to, try to figure out how to shape as much as you can, the time that you spend to harness the fact that you're working with these other great people. And what makes sense is to have as many meetings as possible, you know, and to reply to people as quickly as possible. And unfortunately, all of that leads to a bunch of context switching.
And it makes it very difficult to focus on the things that are most important. Now that's even just within the confines of, of work. Right. And, and, you know, I think it's a little weird to think about like work life balance, because in reality, all of it is part of your life. All of it is important, but these same things happen in, if you want to, if you want to say there's work and then there's like outside or home or whatever, like that same stuff can happen there too, where we're constantly reacting.
Some amount of this reacting and meeting, attending and email responding to is necessary, but the notion that Nirvana is being, you know, having that inbox empty and keeping it empty, having the calendar, you know, packed and being instantly responsive and helpful to everybody else's projects means that you and what matters to you may never happen. And it's not, it's not Nirvana. We we've been there. It's not Nirvana. So the.
The idea with make time is, Hey, like there are some ways to change those defaults and to make time, make them get it, make time for the things that are really important to you. And then we can kind of change the shape of, our, of our days. So,
JZ (19:10)
Yeah.
I remember when we
came up with the title, Make Time, we had a different title for the book. It was called Today. That was the working title. a pretty late stage in the process, not up to publication or anything, but well into when we were writing the book. There was an email, and I don't remember if I wrote it or you wrote it, but there was an email where the phrase that you just used punnily,
Jake (19:25)
dead. Yeah.
JZ (19:49)
Like how, you know, something, something so that you can make time for what really matters. Like that, one of us wrote that in an email and then we were like, Hey, that actually could be, that could be good. so I'm Nick, maybe it's another example of, how you need to do your own writing. writing is writing is thinking writing is the creative process. anyway, I was, I was just thinking about that the other day, the title emerged from the process of writing the book.
Jake (20:14)
Title emerged, yeah,
it did, it did.
JZ (20:18)
if we look back on the conversation that we've been having, think we can, people might be able to see how we we touched on a couple of these key things that sort of build up to.
the system and some of the tactics that we've created. the first one that we talked about was like the how a lot of productivity advice is really focused on efficiency, right? It's about like doing things as quickly and efficiently and responsibly as possible without a lot of thought given to whether they're the right things or whether it's sustainable. that was like the first thing, sort of this idea of like
know, we call it the busy bandwagon in the book. Like it's this idea that, the path of least resistance is to like do things faster. and another word for the path of least resistance is, is defaults. So this idea of defaults is like really key to how we think about this stuff, which is that the, if you struggle with spending time on things that matter or being productive or whatever, it's not because you
You don't have enough willpower or you're not smart enough or you have bad intention. It's because you and everybody else in the world have, have defaults and you're operating within these defaults. and the other thing I thought was pretty meaningful that, that you touched on when you were describing like the, design sprints was that the way to change the defaults is not through like sheer force or like white knuckle determination.
It's by changing the environment that you're in, changing the context. so whether that is the physical environment of in a room full of people and working in a different way, or it's changing that you use and structures that you use to plan your day. We have found that if you can change the environment, then you don't really have to use as much willpower, right? You don't have to like,
Jake (22:14)
Yeah.
JZ (22:15)
try so hard to not get distracted because you have created a situation where distraction is not the default. Distraction is no longer like the path of least anyway, those three things, really stand out to me, even now, years after the book has come out, those stand out as kind of the key assumptions that everything else rests on.
Jake (22:37)
Yeah, it's also a different kind of book because we didn't write it with the intention that you would read the book from cover to cover and do every suggestion that we have in the book. instead it's more like a cookbook and a cookbook has recipes in it. And if you read a cookbook, if you're really into a cookbook, you know, I think you, you read a little bit in beginning, you get to know, is this
JZ (22:47)
Right. Right.
Yeah. Yeah.
Jake (23:02)
What's this chef all about? And what's the philosophy? And maybe you read through and look at all of the different recipes, but you probably aren't gonna cook all of them. Maybe you are, but, and if you are gonna cook all of them, you probably aren't gonna cook all of them right away, at once. You're gonna try one, you can try two, try three, and maybe sometimes a book comes along, cookbook comes along and it changes, I change your cuisine at home and some of these things will.
JZ (23:19)
Right.
Jake (23:32)
will stick on and you'll have your own, your own rotation of things that are, they make you feel great and they're fun and they taste good. And it's the exact same idea with the make time is like meant to be like a cookbook that there, there is that, that framing, that introductory idea of here's the way we have come to see the world and here's why, and here's how these recipes hang together. And then there's some different recipes that you can read through and, and then you can try.
JZ (23:35)
Yeah.
Jake (24:00)
Try one, try two, try three. so there's not the sense. I'd certainly don't have the sense that you have to do all of it. And a lot of the activities, there's what 80 some different, techniques, tactics in the book. 87, 87, almost 90. We really should have put in that a little bit extra work to get to 90. So 87 tactics, 87 recipes that you can cook.
JZ (24:11)
87, 87 tactics.
You
Jake (24:24)
And there are all ways to free yourself up in one way or another so that you have more time, energy, attention for the things that you care about the most. Whatever those things might be, things at work, things with your friends, family, hobbies, whatever those things might be. 87 crowbars to pry open some space for you. And you'll try, you know, whichever ones you want. And some of them don't work for me.
JZ (24:46)
Yeah.
Yeah. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. And I, I mean, I probably only use five to 10 of the tactics on an ongoing basis. There are like five to 10 things that are my, my core go-to tactics. And that's not a, it's not a fixed list. Like as life changes and I have different priorities and I'm working on different things, even different time of year, like
Jake (24:51)
and some of them don't work for John, but they at least work for one of us and some of them work for both of us.
JZ (25:20)
the set of tactics that work well for me changes as well.
Jake (25:23)
So as you said, this has been, it was a side project for us. They grew into being, you know, a book, which is kind of a large side project, but nonetheless, it is a side project and it's sprang out of, talked about the conversations and stuff, but you and I also had written some blog posts, you know, some medium posts, some posts that then got picked up by other outlets and stuff. Cause some of them people were quite interested in either because they were so weird or, know, and some, some intersection of weird and people found them.
to be useful and, then we wrote this book, but it's not part of our main thing. It's not part of investing in companies and helping them grow. but it has been surprising how like folks really have found this useful and adopted it and made their own versions, you know, of their combination of recipes. Folks have found those things to help out. So anyway, all of this is, guess, verging on self-promotion here, but we.
JZ (25:54)
weird and helpful.
Jake (26:21)
wanted to share some of the tactics. Cause we, I think we mentioned this in passing and we had some listeners say, Hey, could you dive a little bit deeper into some of those and like actually really like show us how they work. And so it's probably something we'll come back to you know, every, every so often on, on the podcast here, but, but for today, well, John, do you have a tactic that, that you want to
JZ (26:26)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, I will start with a tactic that became one of the core components of the book, which is the idea of setting a daily highlight. One of those, one of the like blog posts or tweets or whatever that you mentioned that people seem to really like was something I posted on.
Jake (26:59)
classic.
JZ (27:12)
Maybe 10 years ago now that I, at the time I called one big thing and it was this like I had been using to plan my days where instead of having like a big to-do list and like trying to like crank through it, I would take like a note card or like a three by five, like post it note, like I have here. And I would just write and I would just write at the top, the one big thing that I wanted to get done that day. And then I think it was.
I forget if it was one, two, three, if it was like one big thing, two medium, three small or one, three, five or something like that. But it was like, it was this pyramid of like the one big thing. And then like a couple of, of medium sized chunks that could be like, you know, 45 minutes or something. And then a couple of small things that, that were five minutes, 10 minutes, but I, you know, it would be nice to get those it's super simple and it was by no means a hundred percent original, but this notion of.
starting your day by thinking about the one most important thing, the one big thing that you wanted to spend time on was, was really helpful. Like it creates a lot of clarity. And as we both to use that tactic and as we thought more about it and heard back from other people who had tried it, we realized that you could, you could sort of take it even further. it evolved into this idea of.
proactively determining what the highlight of your day could be. And so if you bear with me for a moment, this sort of rhetorical device is like, maybe somebody has asked you like, wow, this is a weird question. Nobody really asks this. But if you sort of imagine, well, what was the highlight of your day? Like, hey, how was your day? Anything cool happen? How did it go? The situation you'd love to be in every day, maybe not every day, but at least most days, the situation you'd love to be in, you'd be like, man.
My day was awesome. Like I, I spent three hours totally in the zone, cranked out that, like that mockup I was working on or finished that blog post or like, you know, I decided it was like, the weather was so nice. So in the afternoon, I like took a couple hours and I like went to the park. went for a run. had a workout. met up with my friend. Like you probably like with the benefit of hindsight, you'd like to look back and be like,
Yeah, that was the highlight of my day. My day was great. My day was a success because I did that one thing. And we sort of thought, well, why not start your day that way? Why not like flip that? And I don't mean by doing it in the morning, but by saying what will be the highlight of my day? Why don't I design my day around that one thing? Whether it's something that I want to get done in sort of a productive work sense or something that is just gonna really
bring me a lot of joy because it's something that I like to do. You can start that way, you can write that down, and then it becomes a really helpful tool for planning the rest of the day, for making decisions about priorities, for confronting the trade-offs. I said that I wanted my highlight to be this satisfying creative project, but when I look at my calendar, it's nothing but back-to-back meetings. Okay, maybe today it's not gonna happen for me, but...
But now I'm acutely aware of that conflict, that situation, and I can start to make some changes to the defaults of my day in order to support this highlight that I really care about. So yeah, that's the highlight in a rather large nutshell.
Jake (30:41)
It's, it's a, it's perfectly sized nutshell because it's, it's a simple concept that has actually a lot to it. And one of the things that is, I think, psychologically powerful about it is that it flips the way our, my brain. And I think the, the societal brain wants us to think or the, or the way all the defaults, the busy bandwagon are pushing us to think, which is that.
JZ (30:44)
Hahaha
Jake (31:09)
we're never enough, that we are never doing enough to catch up to the world of our work, to the world of news, to the relationships in our lives that can now be extended infinitely because of the potential to stay in touch with almost any number of people via social media. There's just, we are never enough. And the result of that is if you buy in, if you accept at face value what you...
JZ (31:11)
Yeah. Yeah.
Jake (31:38)
the world is telling you, then you're inadequate. Your day will never measure up to what it could have, should have been where you actually did everything possible. And the highlight says, no, screw that. I do not accept the world's framing. I have my own framing. This one thing is all that matters to me today. Getting one thing done, like actually having peak attention, 60 to 90 minutes of attention on something in a day.
JZ (31:45)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
you
Yeah.
Jake (32:06)
That's, that's a lot. That's a good day, by the way. Like, and one thing that, man, a while ago I didn't, interviewed Sarah Cooper, who is friend of ours from Google. She went on to become a comedian. She's hilarious. Yeah. Look up her.
JZ (32:08)
That is, yeah.
an amazingly successful one. I checked in on
her recently. I don't mean to say that I spoke to her, but I like, like looked her up online. was like, Sarah Cooper, like, what's she up to? And I was like, my God, she's like super duper famous now.
Jake (32:35)
Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. I, I, it's this total name drop to say that we talked to her, right? Like, but, but you know, yeah, I was watching a show on, I don't know, Netflix or something. And there's Sarah Cooper. Like, what? Like it's amazing. so cool. So, but she, she said, you know, I always tell myself I'm going to do this thing today or this week. And it ends up taking like a month to do it. She said, I just have this.
JZ (32:45)
Yeah.
Jake (33:02)
ongoing problem with underestimating how long things will take. And if I, and she was talking about kind of renegotiating that with herself and the time after she left Google to kind of say like, no, these things take longer. And, and ever since hearing that, like, I've been aspiring to do that, to realize, to recognize that things, you know, big important things, they just take a bit longer than, than I think. The, the thing with the highlight is you're, doing that on the scale of your day in a way that's very manageable. You're saying, look, they're really, if
Just this one thing happens. That would be the most important, the most satisfying, rewarding thing. And it allows you at the end of the day to not feel as though, my God, I didn't do everything. didn't do all the things that I could have done instead to just say like, I did or didn't do that one thing. And if it's just down to that, that spotlight, it's like, well, yeah, maybe you did it. Maybe that happened and that was great. Awesome success. We found in our design sprints that having a focal point for each day.
One day's map, Tuesday's sketch, Wednesday's decide Thursday's prototype, Friday's test. means that we can accomplish that one big thing. can feel like, yeah, all right. Mission accomplished banner. And then if you, if you, you know, if you did it, amazing feeling, if you didn't do it, you can also say like, well, I wonder what went wrong. There's sort of a curiosity there. I wonder what happened. Or sometimes it's because this other thing came up and that became the most important thing. It just gives me like beyond being, it's not like a.
It's not like a productivity tactic. I mean, I suppose it is in a way, but in fact, a powerful one, right? Like you're isolating what's most important to put your attention on. You can get it done, but much more important than that, it's like a way of understanding life and time and meaning and like just, yeah, just that, just all that. You know, it's, cool. It's a really cool thing. and, and we hear from so many folks who read the book that
JZ (34:36)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Was that all?
Jake (34:58)
my God, that the highlight has really been powerful for me. Simple change that, that, very easy to try as easy as having a sticky note, writing a thing down, sticking it on your desk, an easy thing to pick up again, if you do it and then you fall off the wagon of doing it. Like just, just very easy and no stress.
JZ (35:07)
Write it down, yeah.
Totally. Yeah.
I think that you, if I'm remembering this correctly, you have actually suggested that were we to rewrite Make Time or republish Make Time, that we might call it highlight or we might call it the highlight method or we might like orient the book even more around that because it's kind of the, it's the core foundation that a lot of the other tactics and ideas build off of. It's like, you, you can do all these other things, you can like,
Jake (35:35)
Yeah.
JZ (35:47)
be less distracted and you can like have more energy, which is a big part of make time. like, if you don't know why you're doing it, if you don't have the thing that you want to make time for, then it's not as, I don't want say it's not helpful, it doesn't matter, but it is not, it is not being used. Those tactics are not being used to their maximum potential.
Jake (36:07)
Absolutely. Absolutely. the, the book make time is organized into four sections. just as a cookbook might have, you know, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and, don't know, dessert or snacks or something. make time has, highlight is the first section and all of the tactics there. There's, there's the highlight one, but there are also a constellation of tactics around it, around figuring out what's most important to you and kind of, you know, activities you can do as one offs.
JZ (36:18)
dessert.
Jake (36:35)
or on a regular basis and then.
JZ (36:37)
Ways to
sort of carve out time in your day by adjusting your schedule to make time for the highlight. bunch of supporting tactics.
Jake (36:40)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Supporting tactics, right. And then we talk about energize, getting the energy you need to have peak attention when you, when you are ready to, for your highlight. And we talk about laser. like laser focusing, how to have the attention stay on the thing that you want. And, and then reflecting like how to, how to sort of tune the system to work well for you.
So that the highlight already is in make time. it leads off and everything is sort of built I think someday we'll probably write a sequel. We will have more insights into it. And I would definitely call the book highlight. I would definitely focus in even more on that because it is so powerful not to undercut the tactic that I'm going to share, but a highlight is, is where it's
I actually think that instead of sharing my own tactic, I wonder if we should go a little deeper into highlight and help people with some of the framing about how you do it, because the details are really quite important here. And, I was just reminded of this because I was invited to do a talk couple of weeks ago and it's funny because of the.
JZ (37:48)
Mmm.
Okay. Okay.
Jake (38:00)
the audience, was sure they were going to want to talk about design sprints. this happens quite often actually where I'm invited to speak on a podcast or, or do an interview of some kind or give a talk. And I'm like, I bet this is going to be about design sprints. And it turns out to be about make time there that actually they're interested in, this.
JZ (38:15)
Ha
Well, that's what happened
when, when Lenny invited us on his podcast too. Like I remember you got the email from him and then you texted me and, and you were like, guess what he wants to talk about? I was like, you're buying sprints? don't know. Like startup stuff, product management stuff. Nope. Make time. don't know what's going on with our weird psychology that like.
Jake (38:21)
That's right. Yeah.
Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Nope.
JZ (38:40)
Every time somebody wants to talk about make time, we're like, that's interesting. What do you make of that? But it's great. We can save your tactic for another episode. This can be an ongoing series of talking about make time tactics. Okay.
Jake (38:43)
What? Why would you want to talk about that? Yeah. Well, well, the.
Yeah.
Yeah, I like that. I like
that. Well, one thing that I do in, I talk about make time, I give a talk, know, like a keynote talk. like to, I like to actually have people, do their highlight, like write it down. And, and so I've found that it's helpful to break down a few key points that we talk about in the book to, to guide people towards doing it. So if you're listening to this right now or watching on YouTube, you could actually do this right now. We'll explain sort of the framing for you.
JZ (39:05)
Yeah, yeah, sorry.
Yeah.
Mm.
Jake (39:27)
Or, know, you can just, you can just, you can just let it wash over you, listen to it and think about it later. But there are a few parameters to it. So one of the ideas, and I think we mentioned this in passing earlier on in the show, but the notion that you're going to think of a highlight as it's roughly 60 to 90 minutes. I think we think is kind of the sweet spot for this activity. That's.
JZ (39:30)
You
Jake (39:55)
The peak moment of your day. It's not always going to be true. Sometimes it'd be less than that. Sometimes it'd be more than that. But the thing about 60 to 90 minutes is that we found in a lot of the, a lot of the things in make time, they're not things that we just made up. There are things that we, observed teams working when we have done literally hundreds of these design sprints and other formats of sprints where we get to control what happens during the day. And we've observed how people work at their peak on these.
peak challenging projects, how they interact with each other, when they get fatigued, what fatigues them, what things either make it harder or easier for them to focus and solve really difficult problems. And one of those many, many observations, also over those periods of years and years with hundreds of teams, we can change all the variables and see what happens when we change the variables.
JZ (40:51)
Yeah.
Jake (40:52)
So we're really confident in some things that they're not, they don't come from like as this university study on a bunch of students and you know, they were shocking them or whatever with electric shocks, whatever they, was just, was just us working with teams of people and watching what happens and changing it because we're trying to get good outcomes, good business outcomes.
JZ (41:11)
There
was something about the way you described the, know, shocking the university students that made me think of like the quintessential, like 2015 productivity post was like, you know, you'll never believe what this like shocking, you know, university study can teach you about being a more effective executive or something. Yeah, of course.
Jake (41:26)
Ha
Well, I read those posts and I mean,
have references to some really great studies. And by the way, there's some people who are doing studies in universities about attention that are great. It's great stuff. our
JZ (41:40)
Of course, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And often I
think that we have found that, well, yeah, often is the right word. We have found that something we've observed in our own experience, either personally or working with teams, then later we learn about some scientific support for it or backing of it, which is always really interesting to see people arrive at the same lesson from very different places.
Jake (42:05)
Yeah. Yeah. But our place is like the dirty real world of business, of our, of our, our sort of, control over this, this weird environment. So anyway, point is to all my rambling that 60 to 90 minutes is about the length of time that people can maximally focus on something before I think kind of needing a break, whether that's a break to just like stretch their legs.
JZ (42:10)
Yeah, yeah, yes.
Jake (42:34)
let their attention go to something else so they can, you know, sort of recharge a little bit, use the restroom. I mean, there's all kinds of reasons why 60 to 90 minutes is sort of the outer bound of what you can do. But below that, when you go below 60 minutes, it starts to become difficult to actually get into the zone because the 60 to 90 minutes are not 100 % wall to wall peak focus. There's always a ramp up time to get into that peak focus. And if I have a time slot,
Personally, and I know from talking to folks that a lot of other folks feel this way. If I have a time slot to work on something and it's less than 60 to 90 minutes, it's very hard for me to do that ramp up and get into peak attention because I know that the rug is about to be pulled out from under me in 30 minutes, you know, or 15 minutes or whatever. So it's hard. You have to almost get lucky or to get to snap into a peak state of attention and
By the way, like the easy anchor for when I say attention or peak focus is going to be, peak focus on some productivity thing, some writing activity or some email thing or some meeting, something work anchored. It doesn't have to be. Peak focus is also important if you are spending time with your kid. Peak focus is really important. If you're having lunch with a friend, peak focus is really important. If you're doing a hobby, if you're, if the highlight of your day is going for a run or a walk, like any of those things, if you want peak focus.
JZ (43:49)
Yeah.
Jake (44:00)
There's going to be noise in your head as you start doing that thing. And if there's not enough time for it, that noise will eat up the entire sort of opportunity window. So 60 to 90 minutes is not an accidental length of time. It's, what we've, we believe to be like a really good target. So you start off and you think, okay, if I had 60 to 90 minutes to spend on whatever I wanted today, what would that be? When I looked back, yes, John said, what would.
JZ (44:03)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Jake (44:29)
What would sort of have, have made me say, wow, that was, that was the highlight of my day. So that's, that's the first, the first component.
JZ (44:37)
Yeah. And another thing I like about 16 to 90 minutes is that it's, as, as you said, it's long enough that you can really get in into the zone and you can really get some, something meaningful accomplished, but it's short enough that it's like not crazy to fit it into your day. We have found that after working with thousands and thousands of people, and we have a, we have a really great, business partner named Connor Swenson who has, who has taken make time into mostly like
big corporations all around the world and help them adopt these ideas. He has found, and we have found that, that when you, if you really sit down and look at your calendar and look at what you're doing, most people can find a way to make 60 to 90 minutes of time. And so it's, it's big enough to be worthwhile, but it's small enough that it, doesn't feel hopeless. doesn't feel impossible to actually like fit it in.
Jake (45:31)
Yeah. And it's not doable on every day, right? To create space for your own agenda for 60 to 90 minutes. Lord, I know it's not doable on every day. Sometimes it feels like it's not doable on most or any days. So there's also a way of thinking about this, which is, me look at what's happening, what has to happen. And let me just choose the thing that is going to be the highlight that's already there, that's already scripted, has to happen. And then...
JZ (45:33)
Right, right.
Yeah.
Yeah. Totally. Yep.
Jake (45:58)
Then the framing is, how do I bring my peak energy, attention and focus to this thing? And it could be as simple as having labeled it and having identified it as this is the most important thing today. You know, if it's the podcast, the podcast is on my schedule. want to have peak energy for it. So I might as well might as well. Right. So
JZ (46:15)
Might as well. Might as well try.
Jake (46:20)
So, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna think about when I have coffee to optimize my energy for the podcast, not to optimize it for what feels good when I first wake up. I'm gonna opt, yeah.
JZ (46:29)
Yeah. Or when you're going to eat, you know,
maybe you, you closed your email before the podcast because you know, you, you want to be totally focused. Maybe you put your phone in a different room. Like there's all these little decisions, all these really incidentally other tactics in the book, but all these little decisions that you can make once you have that clarity of, okay, this is my highlight. Even if it's something you were going to do anyway, even it's something that's already on your calendar.
Jake (46:45)
Yeah.
And then there are some different framings that we use for ways to think about what makes a good highlight.
JZ (46:59)
Yeah.
And this is like probably the, when we talk about this with people, like if we're giving a talk, like there's two questions that often come up. One is like, are you crazy? Like there's no way I can like, or the, the, the aggressive translation of that question, which is must be nice. Must be nice to be able to, you know, spend, spend your time in such a lovely way. But the
Jake (47:11)
Yeah.
JZ (47:26)
The other more serious question is what should my highlight be? Like, should it always be something that I need to get done? Should it be the thing that's the most urgent, the most important? Like, what should it be? And that's where these different kind of highlight strategies come in handy, which I think is where you
going.
Jake (47:44)
Yeah, and see, I think there's three, three ways that we think about it. And the, the first and most obvious one, but often it's the least powerful, but it's, it's important is urgency. What is the most urgent thing that needs to happen? Now this is when, when I get grandiose and I talk about, you know, meaning and life and like all the stuff that I really believe can.
you can change with the highlight. Urgency is usually not going to creep into those upper stratospheres of value for you, but urgency is important. And yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's certainly common for me to say or think, and it's just this one urgent thing I need to do today. And then I don't actually like...
JZ (48:22)
Maslow's hierarchy, Maslow's pyramid.
Jake (48:36)
But I don't really put my attention on it. I don't make it my highlight and I end up not doing it. Even though it's like, really needed to do it that day. Like yesterday, I told you, I was going to send you an email about something. And I said, I'm going to text you when I'm done so that you can take a quick look at it and reply to me. knew it was the most urgent thing I needed to do. I actually didn't do it. Like they went by and I other stuff, you know, just sort of took over and I didn't do that one thing. And yesterday that was okay, but sometimes it's not okay. Sometimes there's a thing that's the most urgent thing. And you know, I really.
JZ (48:40)
Yeah.
I forgot.
Jake (49:06)
have to, I have to get this done and I have to, I have to make sure it happens and I have to make sure that I, I get it done with the right amount of, of attention on it so that it's done well
JZ (49:17)
good example is when we're in a design sprint and it's Thursday and we're building a prototype and on Friday we've lined up four or five customer interviews and we're going to show them the prototype. That is good urgency. That is like, okay, on that day, the most important thing is getting that prototype done. And it's more important to get it done than to...
make it perfect, right? Like it's more important that it's ready so that you can put it in customers' hands, you can start to learn from them than it is to have it be perfectly polished and have all the features and all the bells and whistles that you hoped for. And there are often things like that. Maybe not as much as the world would like us to think they are. It's probably like number of things that are good urgent is a fraction of the things that are labeled as urgent in the world.
Jake (50:08)
Yes. Yes.
JZ (50:11)
I think most people kind of have an innate sense for when something is good urgent.
Jake (50:16)
Yeah. And it could be something even as simple as like the other day I needed to go to a doctor's appointment with my son. And I thought, you know, this is certainly urgent. It's happening. It has to happen today, but by making it the highlight, it's like, kind of changed the way you feel about it. And so if this is the thing that I'm going to really be there for, try to be present for pay attention to
JZ (50:33)
Interesting. Yeah.
Jake (50:42)
You can let yourself off the hook a little bit from paying being at peak attention and presence like all day. It's just probably not going to happen.
JZ (50:50)
from being like, like, doctor's appointment is like so annoying. It's like, I've got all this work stuff to do and I've got to go to this doctor's appointment. It allows you to reframe it to yourself and the people around you as, no, this actually is the most important thing right now. It's time sensitive, which doesn't take anything away from its importance, perhaps adds to its importance, but it's clarifying.
Jake (50:54)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. And you know, if you're sitting in that appointment and you're thinking this is just something in the way of everything else, that's a tough feeling. And I mean, I'm not saying I'm never like that. Like I'm often doing things and thinking, this is in the way of this other thing. And I need to be doing this and that. But when you can free yourself from that, when I can free myself, it feels terrific. And, and so the highlight could be a trick to turn something urgent into something that.
perhaps in one of the other two categories. So the other two lenses that we like to think about, and one of them is satisfaction. So John, how did you think about like the framing of satisfaction, the lens of satisfaction for choosing a highlight?
JZ (51:44)
Yeah.
Yeah.
To me
It's a helpful way to.
identify activities that are important to you. And you believe are important to the world, something worthy of spending your time on, but left sort of on their own, nobody's going to ask you for them. Nobody's going to, it's not, there's never going to be a deadline. It's never going to be the most time sensitive thing that, has to get done. but there's something inside of you that
Jake (52:16)
Yeah. Yeah.
JZ (52:26)
that tells you it's really worth doing and it's going to be really satisfying. So a lot of times these are our project type highlights. So I would separate them from the third lens, the third strategy, which is joy, which are things that are just, you know, they just make you happy. They're just good for your soul. I would separate them a little bit into like, this might be, it might be grueling. might be hard. It might be, it might feel like pushing a boulder up the hill, but
But when you get done, you're going to feel really good. You're going to feel deeply satisfied, not in a fleeting way, but in the way that you feel when you finish something really important. so I think whether writing project, a design project, coding, creating a presentation, a proposal for something at your job, again, that nobody's asking you for. Nobody's like, hey, when's that going to be done?
but you know it's important. The satisfaction that comes from that can create the conditions for it to be a really worthwhile highlight.
Jake (53:33)
big thesis of ours from the design sprint, from foundation sprints, all of the sprint formats that we run with companies is that the ideas that come, the initiatives that come from people's intuition about the right way to do things, what an individual believes is the right way to do something, that those intuitions, they're really powerful.
I think in our own careers, the things that ended up being the highest value were not things that other people were asking for a lot of the time. Most probably almost all of the time were not things people were asking for. In some cases were things people actively were telling us to stop doing. yet, you know, we found them satisfying. We've fallen some intuition to say like, this is the right thing to do right now. And, and I think it's something that you can tune.
So it's something that can be improved. This sort of intuition about was, I think, I predict this is going to be satisfying. I'm going to go out on a limb and make time for it and make space for it and make it my highlight. And then at the end of the day, I'll look back and was that satisfying and monitoring that monitoring your own compass for satisfaction. This rings true for me. This, this feels like the best way for me to spend this.
small, but important part of my day today. It's amazing what that can unlock. What, what can come from that? I think, the, the design sprint process itself, our, venture fund, the writing, writing posts, writing books, drawing illustrations for those books, all the, all kinds of these things come from this. Trying to tune and get in touch with that sense of.
of satisfaction, what feels like it rings true for what I want to bring to this day, just this day. And it adds up to being more than just one day at a time. But a really powerful one.
the last lens for thinking about your highlight is joy. And it, that's in a way kind of easy. How do you think about joy?
JZ (55:45)
Yeah. mean, I, I don't think about it that deeply because like you said, it's kind of easy. is. think of this and this might not be the perfect way to think about it, but for me, functionally, it's often something that counterbalances the, the, the urgent or satisfying tactics that are again, are more work oriented or the highlights that are more work oriented. This is, you know, maybe.
Jake (56:09)
Yeah. Yeah.
JZ (56:13)
you know, on a Friday of a week where I've been really working hard on things. I have actually literally when we end this podcast, I'm gonna go have lunch with a friend. Like I have lunch with a friend planned, or I'm like, I'm like leaving work early and like, I'm doing something outside or like, I'm, I've given myself kind of a, time of day where I have to
sign out and like, cause I'm making dinner cause like people are coming over and like I'm making dinner for them or you know, even just making dinner for like, for my wife. but it's, it's these activities that are, that are joyful, that are truly enjoyable. And that more often than not kind of recharge my battery and provide this really nice counterbalance to, to work to being sort of on to being focused to trying to, to get things done in a certain way.
Jake (57:01)
Yeah. And those, that joyful thing might even be a part of your work. I love making animations and keynote for slide decks. It's something that I'll go way over the top on. It's unnecessary. And, and I love it. It just totally brings me joy. And so that can be the highlight of the day. It was like, I'm going to add, it's been an hour.
JZ (57:08)
Hahaha.
Jake (57:22)
adding gratuitous animations to this thing and fine tuning the sequencing of them. you know, like that, that's, it could be part of what you're already doing. It could be a special thing. could be part of your, you know, quote unquote work court, quote unquote life, you know, but joy is a powerful one. with that.
JZ (57:25)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, right.
Yeah. And part of why
it's so helpful to think about that as a highlight is that it, puts it on the same level of importance as the, the work oriented, the productive style highlights it. are telling yourself, and perhaps you're even telling the world in some small way you're, you're saying this is important to me. This is going to be the highlight of my day, even though it's not going to have some measurable.
you know, economic output, it is equally important if not more important. And again, the value of the highlight is largely in just providing that framing and providing the scaffolding and the set of then tactics you can use around it to reinforce it, to give it space, to bring the energy and attention to it that it really deserves.
Jake (58:32)
To recap how we think about the highlight, it's a, in the big picture, it's a way to change the dynamic of the busy bandwagon, the world asking us to do a number of things in a day and in our lives. It is not possible. It's not reasonable. saying I, I reject those rules. My, my own rule for my, my own guideline for myself today is I'm just going, I'm going to try my best to,
Bring my attention to this one thing. can write it down, write it on a sticky note, put it somewhere where you can see just that one thing. It's okay if you don't do it also, by the way, if the day comes and you haven't done it, okay. Well, you can just investigate that and ask yourself why. And you know, maybe you did something else important, you know, being gentle about it. It's not meant to beat yourself up, but writing that thing down that you hope to bring attention to looking on the calendar, finding the spot where it's going to happen.
JZ (59:15)
Try again tomorrow. Yeah.
Jake (59:29)
And then as you choose those thinking about 60 to 90 minutes, thinking about which of these frames might be helpful for you, urgency, satisfaction, or joy. And really, you know, if you can combine satisfaction and joy, if you combine with urgency too, that that's going to be, those are going to be great ones.
So there you have it. That is the highlight.
JZ (59:53)
All right, to be continued on a future episode, we'll talk about some other tactics from make time and hopefully make this sort of a recurring segment. As a reminder, if you have any questions for us, anything you want us to talk about, send us an email at hey at jakenjz.com. If you want to get a weekly email that has a link to the latest episode and some other cool stuff that we found in the past week, you can sign up at jakenjz.com. Thank you very much for listening. If you enjoyed this, please
Hit all the buttons below the player, whatever those happen to be, like, comment, subscribe, etc. And we'll see you next week. Thanks, everybody.
Jake (1:00:33)
Thanks guys.