Jake Knapp: observation

Transcript context

…So, I thought we'd start with Make Time and then get to Sprint in the second half of the conversation. First question is just what do most people get wrong when they're trying to become more productive? To set the answer up, I'll give you a super brief history of Make Time. And for over a decade, John and I have been, in quotes, designing time as part of our work with startups, helping them find or expand product market fit. So, we developed a design sprint at Google Ventures, which the Sprint book is about. And now, we run this venture fund of our own called Character. And we run these highly-structured sprints with companies. And when we're doing that, we get to control how everything happens. We get to change the defaults of the way the workday happens, of what happens sort of hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute, how people are using technology, how people are interacting with each other. All those things are sort of under our control because we're trying to achieve these big goals in a really short period of time. Everybody focused. So, as this stuff was going on, John and I started applying some of the lessons, the things that we found were working really well in those structured sprints. We started experimenting with applying those in our own day-to-day lives, and we found that some of those things were super effective and they were a bit counter to the way we'd sort of heard or learned about productivity. And there's all kinds of habit books and productivity hacks out there. And I think John and I have probably tried most of them, if not all of them. But it seems like 99% of the people who follow those things are still feeling overwhelmed, they're still stressed out all the time anyway. So, even though we are not productivity gurus, this hasn't been like this thing we were doing forever, it's not our full-time job, but we thought we want to share this framework. So, Make Time, the book and the blog that proceeded it was just kind this side project to share what we learned. And yeah, it seems like it is resonated with a bunch of people. There's this kind of steady stream of interest in looking at these things a different way. I love it. I love that it emerged out of the sprint concept. I know you talked about the book, but I forgot that and these are all very related. I also love that a lot of the best stuff comes from people actually doing the thing. This came from, "I just have discovered all these little things and I'm just going to share it." Not just like, "I need to write a productivity book."…

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