Hey Time Dorks!
Welcome to the July edition.
Before we dive in, a couple of quick updates.
On the work front: I’ve been trying something new over the last month: making YouTube videos. It’s been a lot of fun — and honestly, pretty humbling. Turns out talking to a camera is a very different skill than talking to a room full of people. I’m trying to enjoy being a beginner again. Any advice is welcome.
On the home front: We’re about eight weeks away from welcoming our second baby, so life currently revolves around doctor’s appointments, decorating her nursery, and wondering how we’ve managed to forget everything from the first time around.
All right, onto this month’s idea.
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A Perspective
I think it’s no secret that staying focused is harder than it used to be.
When Make Time came out in 2018, our phones were already pretty dang distracting. Since then, it’s gotten even crazier.
Short-form video has exploded with TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube shorts. And AI has made it possible to spend countless hours going down whatever rabbit hole happens to catch your attention.
I’ll often sit down to write, a random question pops into my head, and twenty minutes later I’m deep into a conversatoin Claude that has nothing to do with what I was supposed to be writing.
That’s why I believe so strongly in the Make Time philosophy of creating barriers between you and all those irresistible Infinity Pools out there.
But here’s what still surprises me: even after you’ve removed the distractions, focusing can still be surprisingly hard.
One misconception I hear all the time—whether I’m coaching a client or leading a workshop—is that focus should feel easy.
People expect to sit down, decide to concentrate, and immediately slip into a state of deep focus.
But that’s rarely what happens.
Instead, many people sit down to work, and within seconds their mind starts bouncing all over the place. Suddenly they remember an email they absolutely have to send. Thirty minutes later, they’re finally back to the task they meant to start.
The worst part isn’t usually the time lost to the context-switching. It’s the story we tell ourselves aftewards.
Maybe I don’t have enough discipline…
Maybe I’m lazy…
Maybe I’m just bad at concentrating…
In my experience, this limiting belief only reinforces the cycle of trying to concentrate, struggling, giving up, and concluding you’re simply not good at it.
Eventually, I realized the deeper struggle is not with the external distraction. It’s with the discomfort itself.
The thing that’s helped me most is simply accepting those difficult, frustrating feelings that show up whenever I sit down to do something hard.
To me, it’s like warming up at the gym. Your body’s a bit cold, your joints are stiff, and the first 10-15 minutes you’re easing in. I don’t leave the gym just because I feel tight in the warm-up, I know it’s part of the process.
I’ve realized that the beginning of a focus session deserves the same kind of patience.
I don’t expect those first few minutes to feel focused anymore. Instead, I expect them to feel a little scattered, a little frustrating, a little uncomfortable.
That’s just the warm-up.
Yes, there are days when I sit down to work on something I’m genuinely excited about and focus arrives almost immediately. That’s awesome.
But for me (and for most people I’ve worked with) it’s not an everyday occurence.
On those days, I remind myself that difficulty is part of the process.
Practically speaking, I give myself ten minutes when I’m starting a difficult piece of work to warm-up.
I don’t have to do anything brilliant.
I just have to make sure I don’t do anything else.
Time and time again, that initial irritation fades into the background, my brain starts to kick into gear, and I’m off to the races.
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A Tactic
If you ever feel like the moment you try to focus on one thing, all this other stuff on your mind starts coming to the surface, then I recommend revisiting Make Time Tactic #55:
Make a Random Question List.
It’s quite simple.
When you sit down for your Highlight, grab a blank piece of paper and keep it next to your keyboard.
As soon as one of those unrelated thoughts pops into your head, write it down.
Don’t Google it. Don’t ask AI. Don’t act on it. Just write it down, and come back to the thing you chose to work on.
I’ve found this becoming even more useful over the last year because AI has made it incredibly easy to chase every curiosity.
Writing those questions down is my way of telling my brain, “Not right now. We’ll come back to this.”
That tiny bit of mental offloading makes it much easier to stay with what I chose to work on.
At the end of that work block, I’ll take a look at what’s on that page.
Some of it is actually useful, and I’ll take action on it or schedule it for later.
But a surprising amount of it no longer feels urgent, even though thirty minutes earlier it felt ncredibly important.
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A Deeper Dive
If this newsletter resonated with you, I think you’ll enjoy my latest YouTube video.
It’s all about protecting your focus and includes a few more tactics that have helped me over the years.
→ How to focus without distraction
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One More thing
I recently finished Rafa, Netflix’s documentary on Rafael Nadal.
Tennis was my sport growing up, so I’m an easy sell when it comes to documentaries like this. Even so, this one really stood out.
I won’t spoil anything, but if you’re into sports documentaries or just admire extraordinary competitors, I think you’ll enjoy it.
See you next month,
Connor
