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We are Jake and JZ. 1 We are not rocket-building billionaires like Elon Musk, handsome Renaissance men like Tim Ferriss, or genius executives like Sheryl Sandberg. Most time-management advice is written by or about superhumans, but you will find no superhumanity in these pages. We’re normal, fallible human beings who get stressed out and distracted just like everyone else.
What makes our perspective unusual is that we’re product designers who spent years in the tech industry helping to build services like Gmail, YouTube, and Google Hangouts. As designers, our job was to turn abstract ideas (like “Wouldn’t it be cool if email sorted itself?”) into real-life solutions (like Gmail’s Priority Inbox). We had to understand how technology fits into—and changes—daily life. This experience gives us insight into why Infinity Pools are so compelling, and how to prevent them from taking over.
A few years ago, we realized we could apply design to something invisible: how we spent our time. But instead of starting with a technology or business opportunity, we started with the most meaningful projects and the most important people in our lives.
Each day, we tried to make a little time for our own personal top priority. We questioned the defaults of the Busy Bandwagon and redesigned our to-do lists and calendars. We questioned the defaults of the Infinity Pools and redesigned how and when we used technology. We don’t have limitless willpower, so every redesign had to be easy to use. We couldn’t erase every obligation, so we worked with constraints. We experimented, failed, and succeeded, and, over time, we learned.
In this book, we’ll share the principles and tactics we’ve discovered, along with many tales of our human errors and dorky solutions. We thought this one was a good place to start: