Make Time

Their diagnosis is that two forces consume a day: Busy Bandwagon, the culture of default busyness and reactive work, and Infinity Pools, the apps and feeds that refill endlessly and never signal a stopping point.

Neither is anyone's decision. Both are defaults, and their argument is that a default can be changed without any change in discipline.

Busy work and bottomless feeds are defaults, not choices. Defaults can be changed without any discipline at all.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The first step: choose one thing each day that will be the day's focus, and choose it by asking what would make today feel satisfying rather than what is most urgent.

Their sizing guidance is specific — sixty to ninety minutes, large enough to matter and small enough to finish. The purpose is intention rather than throughput: a day with a completed highlight feels different even if the rest was ordinary.

The second step: defend attention for the highlight, mostly by removing distraction rather than by summoning focus.

Their most radical tactic is the distraction-free phone — deleting social apps, email and browsers from the device entirely — which they present as reversible, immediately effective, and much easier than it sounds.

Their third step, and the one that distinguishes the book from other attention advice: treating the brain as part of a body, and attention as dependent on movement, food, sleep and quiet.

Their tactics are modest and evidence-aligned — short daily exercise rather than a programme, real food, caffeine timed deliberately rather than habitually, and protecting sleep as an input rather than a residual.

The fourth step: a brief daily note on what was chosen, what worked, and what to adjust — treating the whole system as an experiment rather than a regime.

This is the part most readers skip and the part that makes the menu approach function, since the point is to discover which tactics work for you rather than to comply with all of them.

It is a menu, not a programme. Without the daily note you never learn which items on it are yours.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Roughly eighty small tactics across the four steps, presented explicitly as options to try rather than rules to follow.

The design is deliberate: they argue that productivity systems fail because they demand total adoption, and that picking two or three that fit your circumstances produces more change than attempting all of them for a week.

Both authors designed products at large technology companies, including ones explicitly built to capture attention, and the book's authority rests partly on that.

It is also a limitation. Their prescriptions assume a job with some discretion over daily structure, and the highlight concept is difficult to apply in genuinely reactive work — support, clinical, or shift-based roles.

There is no evidence base and no argument, by design. This is a book of practices assembled from personal experimentation and presented as such, which is honest but means nothing here is established.

Several tactics are also trivially obvious, and the eighty-item menu pads the count with variations on a handful of ideas.

Against Newport it is far more practical and far less philosophical — Newport argues a position, Knapp and Zeratsky hand you a list.

Against *Atomic Habits* it is narrower, addressing the daily allocation of attention rather than behaviour change generally. It is also considerably shorter, and it is designed to be used rather than read.

The highlight practice alone is worth trying for a week: name one thing in the morning, protect time for it, and notice whether the day feels different regardless of what else happened.

And the distraction-free phone, which is the single highest-leverage tactic in the book and the one most readers dismiss before trying.