I’ll be honest — I’ve read my fair share of self-help and productivity books. Most of them follow the same formula: chapters of background information, a framework with a catchy acronym, and then finally, on page 200 or so, the actual advice. So when I picked up Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, I wasn’t expecting much that was different. I was wrong.

This is my honest review of Make Time — and really, a story about what happened when I put the book’s ideas into practice and why they stuck when so many others didn’t.

One Highlight a Day Changes Everything

The central idea in Make Time is refreshingly simple: every day, pick one thing that matters most to you. They call it your Highlight. It’s not a to-do list. It’s not a calendar full of priorities. It’s just one thing.

Before reading this book, I was a chronic list-maker. I’d schedule several tasks I wanted to accomplish, work through some of them, and then feel vaguely defeated by everything still left undone. Sound familiar? The problem wasn’t effort — it was focus. Without a single clear priority, I was always a little scattered.

When I started picking one Highlight each day, something shifted. On the days I followed through, I felt genuinely accomplished. Not “I got stuff done” accomplished — more like “that mattered” accomplished. That’s a different feeling entirely.

But What About Email?

Here’s where I want to be honest about something, because it took me a while to figure this out. When I first started using the Highlight method, I was diligent about choosing something meaningful every single day. And I did feel great about it. However, I was letting my email pile up in the background, and that stress was quietly building.

So I tried something: I made email my Highlight one day a week, usually Fridays. And it worked. I still skim my inbox daily to catch anything urgent, but I’m not spending every morning buried in messages and losing half my day to it. Make Time actually suggests this approach — check email once a day, block time for it, and clear your inbox on a scheduled basis. It’s a practical system, not a rigid rule.

A Productivity Book That Respects Your Time

What I appreciate most about Make Time is that it respects the reader’s time from page one. Rather than making you wade through chapters of theory before getting to anything useful, the authors give you tactics right away. It reads more like a workbook than a traditional self-help book, and that format makes it easy to start implementing things immediately.

That’s not as common as you’d think. I also reviewed Getting Things Done by David Allen, which is a well-known productivity classic focused on filing systems and inbox management. I found it to have limited practical value overall, though I did adopt one useful email-organization method from it. Make Time feels like the opposite experience — it’s almost entirely practical, and the ideas are ones you can actually try today.

My Overall Thoughts

If you’ve ever finished a day feeling busy but unproductive, Make Time is worth your time. It doesn’t promise to overhaul your life or optimize every hour. Instead, it gives you a simple, flexible way to design your days around what actually matters — and it starts working almost immediately.

For anyone tired of self-help books that make productivity feel like a second job, this one is a breath of fresh air. I’d genuinely recommend it.