The author, who created the fastest work method “Sprint (design sprint)” at Google and revolutionized the way companies work around the world, has now created a method to make the most of time. This is summarized in “The Encyclopedia of Time Techniques: 87 Time Techniques That Really Change Your Life” (Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, Translated by Yuko Sakurai, Diamond Publishing). The book quickly became a hot topic and has been decided to be published in 16 countries around the world.
The authors, Jake Knapp at Google and John Zeratsky at YouTube, are “professionals of addiction” who have been researching mechanisms to attract as many people’s eyes as possible even for “one minute, one second”.
It is precisely because the two of them know so much about the mechanism of human psychology that this book’s timing technique is unique and extremely true to its essence. Everything is constructed from a thoroughly cold and realistic point of view, saying, Humanwillpower” is almost useless.”
Furthermore, he says, “No matter how much you increase your productivity, you are simply meeting the expectations of others,” and you are not doing anything for yourself. So, in this fast-paced world of technology, how should we manage our time to truly enrich our lives? Reprinted from “Diamond Online”, part of the book will be published several times.
I find myself looking at my smartphone
That was in 2012. My son was playing with a wooden train set in the living room. Luke (8 years old at the time) was busy connecting the tracks and Flynn (baby) was drooling on the locomotive. At that time, Luke suddenly raised his head and said. “Dad, why are you looking at your phone?”
Luke didn’t mean to blame me, he was just wondering. But I couldn’t answer. Of course, there must have been some reason to check my email at that moment, but not much. I had been looking forward to spending time with my children since the morning, and when the time finally came, I was in a daze.
At that moment, something clicked in my head. I wasn’t just distracted for this moment. The problem is much deeper than that.
Day after day, I was just reacting to what was in front of me. In your calendar, in your emails, in your endlessly updated content on the internet. Time with family spilled more and more, but for what? “To reply to one more message and cross one more item off your to-do list?”
When I realized this, I was deeply disappointed. Because until then, I thought I was striving for a well-balanced life.
Remove ‘distractions’ from your iPhone
Around this time, I considered myself a master of productivity and efficiency. I kept my working hours moderate and came home in time for dinner every night. I thought it was the ideal work-life balance.
But if so, why did my 8-year-old son think I was lying? “You should have been in control of your work, so why were you always frustrated and distracted?” Even though the 200 unprocessed emails in the morning were reduced to zero by midnight, can it really be said that it was a fulfilling day?
And then I suddenly realized. Just because you’re more productive doesn’t mean you’re doing your most important work. They simply respond quickly to other people’s priorities.
Because I was always worried about the net, I didn’t face my child head-on. I’ve been putting off the big goal of “I want to do it someday” to write a book. In fact, several years passed without me typing a single page. I was treading water in a sea of someone’s emails, someone’s updates, and someone’s lunch images.
Not only was I disappointed in myself, I was furiously angry. In anger, I deleted Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram apps from my smartphone. Every time an icon disappeared from the home screen, it felt like a weight was lifted from my heart.
Then I saw the Gmail app and gritted my teeth. I was at Google at the time, working on the Gmail team for years. I loved Gmail. Still made my heart a demon. I still remember the message that appeared on the screen at that time. In disbelief, he asked me if I was serious about deleting the app. I gulped and tapped “delete”.
I thought I would feel anxious and lonely without the app. In the days that followed, I certainly had a change of heart. I didn’t feel stressed though. Rather, I was relieved and felt a sense of liberation.
I no longer have the habit of reaching for my iPhone reflexively when I get bored, even just a little bit. The time I spent with my children passed slowly, in a good way.
“Oh my god,” I thought. “If even the iPhone wasn’t helping us to enrich our lives, what else?”
I loved the iPhone and the futuristic capabilities it gave me. But by accepting the defaults that came along with that ability, I was always tied to the shiny device in my pocket.
Find out what you can “reset”
I wondered how many other parts of my life had to be rethought, reset, and redesigned. Where are the defaults we blindly accept? “And what should we do to regain the initiative?”
Shortly after my iPhone experiments, I moved to a new job. While still at Google, he joined Google Ventures (now GV), a venture capital firm that invests in startups outside the company.
There, on the first day, I met a man named John Zeratsky.
At first I tried to dislike John. John is younger than me and honestly looks better than me. What I don’t like about it is that it’s always calm. I’ve never seen John suffer from stress.
Finishing important work ahead of schedule and even finding time for side projects. Get up early, finish work early, go home early. Always smiling. How can you do that?
That said, I ended up becoming good friends with John, aka JZ. I quickly found that JZ and I got along very well – we’re practically brothers now.
Like me, JZ was fed up with the idea of being busy. We are both tech enthusiasts and have been involved in designing technical services for years (JZ was on YouTube while I was on the Gmail team). But we were also beginning to realize that a huge amount of attention and time was wasted on such services.
And JZ, like me, thought we had to do something about this situation. JZ was kind of Obi-Wan Kenobi on this subject, except that he wore checkered shirts and jeans instead of robes, and believed in The System instead of the Path of the Force. Different.
A “system” to keep distractions away
The “system” he preached was even mysterious. It didn’t take any concrete form yet, but JZ believed that “there is certainly such a thing.” A “system” is, in essence, a simple framework for keeping distractions away, conserving energy, and making more time.
Will you pull me a little? “I was like that too at first.” But while listening to him talk about “the system,” I found myself nodding my head. With a deep knowledge of ancient human history and evolutionary psychology, JZ saw part of the problem as a huge gap between our hunter-gatherer roots and the fast-paced modern world.
And from a product designer’s point of view, he believes that the only way to make this “system” work is to change the defaults and distance yourself from distractions, rather than relying solely on willpower to fight distractions. rice field.
That’s right, I realized. This “system” is exactly what I was looking for if I could really complete it.
That’s why I teamed up with JZ and embarked on an adventure.
Who are we and what kind of book is this?
We are Jake and JZ. I’m not a billionaire building rockets like Elon Musk, a handsome man like Tim Ferris, or a business genius like Sheryl Sandberg.
When it comes to time management books, it’s usually written by superhumans or about superhumans, but no superhumans appear in this book. We are just like you, stressed, distracted, error-prone, normal people.
We have a slightly different perspective because we’re product designers with years of experience in the tech industry building products like Gmail, YouTube, and Google Hangouts.
As designers, we’ve worked to turn abstract ideas (“Wouldn’t it be nice if emails were sorted automatically?”) into real-world solutions (like Gmail’s Priority Box). To do that, I needed to understand where technology fits in my life and how it is changing my life.
Through this experience, we are able to understand why the convenient services on our smartphones, laptops, TVs, etc. I came to have the idea of
Time can be “designed”
Then, a few years ago, we realized that we could “design” the invisible thing called time. But rather than tapping that realization into technology and business opportunities, we decided to apply it to the most meaningful projects in our lives and the time we spend with the people who matter most.
Every day, I tried to make a little time for the things that matter most to me. To-do lists and calendars have been redesigned to address the trend of thinking that being busy is the right thing to do. We’ve reviewed all of our unconscious habits and redesigned how and when we use technology.
Our willpower is limited, so every design had to be easy to implement. Also, I could not turn down all the promises, so I moved within the constraints. After repeated experiments, failures, and successes, I finally arrived at the answer.
In this book, we share the principles and tactics we developed, as well as the human errors we made and the geeky solutions we made.