Everyone on my team Slack channel was raving about Make Time like it was going to revolutionize their workflows. "It's from the Sprint guys!" "It's not your typical productivity book!" Cool. I queued it up for my Monday morning Caltrain ride, 1.75x speed, because let's be honest - business books that promise to change your relationship with time have a 90% chance of being a blog post stretched to book length.
I was half right.
The Blog Post Problem (But Not Quite)
Look, I'll give Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky this: Make Time is self-aware enough to acknowledge that most of its tactics are not groundbreaking. The four-step framework - Highlight, Laser, Energize, Reflect - is basically a daily sprint retro for your personal life. Pick one priority each day (your "Highlight"), protect your attention from infinity pools (their term for apps designed to keep you scrolling forever), take care of your body so your brain works, and then reflect on what happened. If you've ever done any kind of agile retrospective, congratulations, you already know 60% of this book.
But here's where I disagree with the people calling the tips "obvious." Some of them genuinely surprised me. The "Highlight" concept isn't just "pick a to-do" - they frame it as choosing the thing that, at the end of the day, you'd want to tell someone about. That reframe actually shifted how I think about my mornings. And the section on "infinity pools" hit different when they talked about designing your phone's home screen to be a tool instead of a slot machine. I actually deleted Twitter from my phone screen that same commute. (It lasted four days. But still.)
The problem is that for every sharp insight, there are two or three that feel like they're written for someone who has never heard of Do Not Disturb mode. "Try turning off notifications!" "Consider not checking email first thing!" I get that not everyone lives in tech, but when the authors literally designed products at Google, the irony of telling me to put my phone in a drawer is... something.
Two Authors, One Microphone (Mostly)
So about the narration situation. Knapp and Zeratsky narrate this themselves, and it genuinely sounds like two dudes explaining their system over coffee. Which is both the strength and the weakness. Their energy is real - you can tell they actually use this stuff and care about it. Knapp has this slightly faster, more enthusiastic delivery, while Zeratsky is more measured. The contrast keeps things moving.
But - and this is a real issue for the audiobook format - Make Time is structured as a menu of 87 tactics you're supposed to browse and pick from. In print, you'd flip through, dog-ear the ones that apply to you, skip the rest. In audio, you're sitting through all 87 in sequence, including the ones about "try eating a real breakfast" when you've been meal-prepping since college. The book literally tells you not to read it cover to cover. Guess what an audiobook forces you to do?
At 1.75x, the whole thing clocked in at under 3 hours for me. Two commutes, done. And honestly, that's about right for the density of content here.
What Actually Stuck With Me (Three Weeks Later)
I'm writing this review three weeks after finishing, and here's what survived: the Highlight concept (I now write one on a sticky note every morning at my desk), the "distraction-free phone" idea (I moved all social apps to a second screen - compromise from deletion), and weirdly, their take on caffeine timing. They suggest cutting off coffee by 2PM and the reasoning is grounded in actual adenosine receptor science. The science actually holds up, and my sleep has been marginally better. Kevin noticed before I did.
What didn't stick: the "design your afternoon" tactics, the journaling prompts (sorry, I already have enough daily standups), and most of the energize section, which basically boils down to "exercise, eat well, sleep more." Accurate? Sure. Novel? No.
Your Commute Deserves Better (Maybe)
Perfect for: train, gym. Skip for: deep work (ironic, I know).
If you're already optimizing your days - if you've read Atomic Habits, Deep Work, or even just spent time configuring Focus modes on your iPhone - the ROI on this audiobook is low. You'll get maybe 3-4 genuinely useful tactics out of 87. If you're NEW to thinking about time and attention intentionally, this is actually a pretty solid starter kit. Hidden Potential scratches a similar itch if you want the starter-kit energy but with more actual research behind the recommendations. The conversational tone makes it approachable in a way that Cal Newport's books aren't.
But the audiobook format genuinely hurts this one. This is a reference book pretending to be a narrative, and the audio version strips away the one thing that makes the format work: the ability to skip. Get the Kindle version, skim it in an hour, implement the three things that apply to your life. Your commute time is better spent on something you can't speed-read.
