Smash Notes
Making Time
Nobody ever looked at an empty calendar and said, The best way to spend this time is by cramming it full of meetings! or got to work in the morning and thought, Today I'll spend hours on Facebook! Yet that's exactly what we do. Why? In a world where information refreshes endlessly and the workday feels like a race to react to other people's priorities…
Notes
-
Zeratsky is a co-author of the book, Sprint, and other books. Recently, he wrote another book with Jake Knapp called, Make Time, which is about helping people become more productive.
-
The book is like a memoir of their experiences of overcoming time management challenges, and then targeting and implementing changes so they can spend time on the things that are important to them. Both of them struggled with making time, especially in the tech industry.
-
It’s about the five-day Design Sprint process. One reason that people enjoy the book so much is because it gives people a formula for erasing work defaults of a normal day. New set of default scheduling can be put into place so people can focus on the projects that are important to them.
-
The first step is proactively choosing a highlight. The second step is being laser focused. The third step is being energized and taking care of our bodies. The fourth step is to spend some time in our day to analyze how our time is being spent, and figure out the changes to make the following day.
-
That smartphones are distracting because of notifications. Although they can be annoying, it’s an overstatement to say that they are the main cause of distractions. As humans, we have the ability to tune them out and focus on our goals.
-
On Rocketship.fm's Making Time, John Zeratsky, co-author of Make Time with Jake Knapp, says each new platform a team adopts is like debt. The payment comes due every day or every hour. Debt is not automatically bad. It lets you buy what you could not otherwise. It turns dangerous when you never get the benefit and you are stuck paying. Tools meant to make a team productive can do the reverse. He wants as few as possible: Slack inside the company and email outside, or Google Sheets instead of a heavy project app. A leader's "let's try this" is cheap for the executive and expensive for everyone who then has to live in the tool.
-
A relatively small decision made by an executive can produce a huge ripple effect for the people they work with. By looking at how our choices affect everyone we work with, it forces us all to slow down and become more thoughtful.
-
Zeratsky states that it may not be right when we wake up, but statistically, morning people tend have the most energy versus in the afternoon or evening. Challenging activities should be aligned with the part of the day where we have the most energy. Less energy consumed tasks can be pushed later in the day.
-
Zeratsky states that blocking days work really well as a small team, but less well as an entire company. Also, you should agree as a team the particular days to block and make sure that you have support from your management because it will affect everyone else as a whole.