Create Space: Strategies for Focusing on What Matters Most Each Day

Vivek: Good To have this book

India on Oct 06, 2023

Nathik: Make Time" is a solid book with a lot of solid advice on how to navigate in hyper-connected world. Many of us questioningly accept "busyness" as a virtue and sometimes the nature of job that comes our way are BS jobs which doesn't reflect who we are and what we want. And books like these help us on design our life and prioritize the things which we value.

The book itself is a fun and straightforward read. If you are like me, you already have many of the advices already designed into your life. Anyways, I wanted to write this review only after trying out few things in practice. Matter of fact the writers suggest same.

OBSERVE → GUESS → EXPERIMENT → MEASURE

There were many advise which I already have it in my system and there were few which I experimented with. Overall solid book.

CHOOSE YOUR HIGHLIGHT

1. Write it down
2. Groundhog it
3. Stack rank your life
a. Make a list of big things.
b. Choose the most important things.
c. Choose the 2nd, 3rd, 4th & 5th.
d. Rewrite priority.
e. Draw a circle on it.
f. Choose this list to help you choose your highlight
4. Batch the little stuff
5. The might do list
6....

India on Aug 22, 2023

Nancy Korb: Well written.

United States on Aug 18, 2023

Elisa: Bon livre. Il offre des bon points de vue sur notre facon actuelle d'occuper notre temps et des conseils sur comment mieux l'occuper.
Jais bien adoré le style d'écriture !

France on Aug 15, 2023

Eoghan Champkin: A short Simple book poached full of ideas to regain your time and sanity. Opposing points of view really highlight that there are many ways to make time. A good read.

Japan on Jun 25, 2023

Cliente de Amazon: Había leído que este libro es bueno y la vdd es que si, cómprenlo!

Mexico on Dec 29, 2022

Dunyazad: I started this book almost six months ago, and really enjoyed the beginning. It provides some helpful productivity advice in a light and breezy writing style. There's nothing really groundbreaking here, but I still found it helpful: the key ideas are to choose one Highlight for each day, use various techniques to increase your focus (often by reducing distractions) and increase your energy, and refine your process continuously by reflecting on what works and what doesn't. Many of the techniques are tiny and straightforward but still impactful, like signing out of social media accounts so that you need to put in just a little bit more effort and thought before getting caught up in a distraction.

What I didn't like was the energy section's emphasis on evolutionary psychology and living like a caveman (the caveman was called Urk, which I found irritatingly cutesy). The basic idea is that there's a "huge disconnect between our hunter-gatherer roots and our crazy modern world", and we should try to live more like a caveman because our bodies evolved for that lifestyle. This perspective requires some extreme simplifications that often seemed pretty dubious. Here's one...

United States on Jun 27, 2019

Joseph Newell: TL;DR: Make Time has helped both my wife and I take much greater control over our days, helping us focus more on what fulfills and less on just marking days off of a calendar.

There's a real line between being a productive person, and being a productivity person. Someone who focuses on so many "hacks" or ways to get more out of every second, that efficiency in and of itself becomes to goal to the expense of everything else. That may be useful in a manufacturing job, but in our daily lives, there is surely more.

This is where Make Time really shines. Far from being a mad dash to some invisible finish line, Make Time provides simple, easy to read tools that can be used to refocus on what truly makes you happy. The book is written as a bit of a toolbox, meant to allow you to take pieces that work for you, and leave the ones that don't. Using that approach has massively improved my lifestyle.

As an example, after reading a few chapters in Make Time, I started having a morning ritual with my wife of making a hot cup of herbal tea, nuts, and cheese. Meanwhile, we would rearrange our chairs in our front room to face the sun and talk about what our highlights would be...

United States on Sep 25, 2018