The Highlight Course

Learn to make time for what matters every day with our new 5-week program. Featuring more than three hours of original video, personalized activities, and a global community of people like you.

Get started today 🥳

All of us wish we could spend more time on the things that matter, and less time on the distractions and obligations that get in the way. But you might have noticed… this is actually super hard to do in real life.

Why? It’s hard to stay focused because we live in a crazy world—a world full of sneaky defaults that shape our time and attention.

Think about it: Most mornings, you wake up, grab your phone, check email, and maybe look at the news or Instagram. Then you realize you’re running late, get ready, start work, only to spend most of the day sitting in pointless meetings and playing Whack-A-Mole with email and chat.

This wasn’t a series of deliberate decisions, and it wasn’t your fault. These default actions are just the collection of habits and norms that have stuck over the years.

This course is about stopping the blur, slowing down, and making time for the moments that matter—instead of reacting to the next message in your inbox or the next item on your to-do list.

Start each day by choosing a Highlight

Out of all the advice in our book Make Time, there’s one tactic that has the power to transform how you spend your days. Thousands of readers have told us how choosing a daily Highlight gives them a much-needed sense of clarity and purpose.

It’s simple. Start each day by asking yourself the question:

“What will be the Highlight of my day?”

You might choose something that needs to get done. Or a satisfying project that you’ve been meaning to make time for. Perhaps you’ll choose a joyful Highlight; something that sounds just plain fun.

Your Highlight is not the only thing you’ll do each day. Most of us can’t ignore our inboxes or say no to our bosses. But your Highlight gives you a chance to be proactive instead of letting technology, office defaults, and other people set your agenda.

Research shows that the way you experience your days is not determined primarily by what happens to you. In fact, you create your own reality by choosing what you pay attention to. This might seem obvious, but we think it’s a big deal: You can design your time by choosing where you direct your attention. And your daily Highlight is the target of that attention.

About the Highlight Course

Our new course begins with helping you use the Highlight method to transform your days, but it doesn’t stop there. Not even close. 

In the Highlight Course, you will:

• Discover where your time goes now, and decide where you want to spend it instead.
• Understand which activities and people give you energy (and which ones zap it).
• Master strategies for choosing a daily Highlight and fitting it into your schedule.
• Practice using your Highlight to make time every day.
• Reconfigure technology so you’re in charge of your time (instead of letting devices run your day).
• Learn to build and maintain energy so you can enjoy the moments that matter.
• Reflect daily to build strong habits for focusing on what matters.
• Make a plan for big life changes like your Someday Project.

“The course empowered me to focus and get things done. Creating Highlights and removing distractions really helped me make time for what I care about each day.”  —Christine in New York

“This is the best course I have ever taken. I will keep using the book, the course, and the community. I bought several copies of the book for friends in the hope that they will learn as much as I have.”  —Ward in Belgium

This course contains our latest and best advice. We’re taking everything we have learned from the past few years—from dozens of presentations and workshops, and countless conversations with readers and experts—to create the best possible resource for helping you make time for what matters.

The Highlight Course is not just a collection of videos. During the course, you’ll get real-time support from a community of people like you, all working to make time for what’s important to them.

Plus, you’ll have direct access to Jake and JZ. We’ll be there in the community with you, and we’ll meet for video Q&A discussions every couple of months. We love this stuff, and we love talking about it with other Time Dorks. We can’t wait to chat about it with you!

What’s inside The Highlight Course?

The Highlight Course consists of videos, activities with worksheets, and the Make Time Community.

• 

• 

• 

• 

Our goal is to help you create a healthy, sustainable habit of using the daily Highlight and the rest of the Make Time framework to focus on what matters every day.

Here’s how we’ll do it…

Week 1
Welcome to The Highlight Course

• 🎥 Video: Making Time for What Matters
• 🎥 Video: How Make Time works
• 📝 Activity: Stack Rank Your Life (Real & Ideal)
• 📝 Activity: Energy Givers & Zappers
• 💬 Share: Introduce yourself to the community
• 💬 Share: What do you want to make time for?

Week 2
The Highlight Method

• 🎥 Video: Introduction to the Highlight method
• 🎥 Video: How to choose a Highlight
• 📝 Activity: Write Down Tomorrow’s Highlight
• 👩‍💻 Activity: Schedule Tomorrow’s Highlight
• 🎥 Video: To-Do List Battle
• 📝 Activity: Reflect on Today
• 💬 Share: Get support for your daily Highlights
• 💬 Share: What questions or challenges do you have?

Week 3
Beat Distraction to Find Laser-Like Focus

• 🎥 Video: Introduction to Laser mode, and why we care so much
• 🎥 Video: Why Infinity Pools are so hard to resist
• 🎥 Video: How Habits Work
• 📱 Activity: Block Distraction Kryptonite
• 📱 Activity: Try a Distraction-Free Phone
• 👩‍💻 Activity: Log Out
• 👩‍💻 Activity: Slow Your Inbox
• 💬 Share: Which Infinity Pools do you struggle with?
• 💬 Share: What did you remove, and how is going?
• 💬 Share: Continue to get support for your daily Highlights

Week 4
Use Your Body to Energize Your Brain

• 🎥 Video: Introduction to Energize
• 🎥 Video: You are more than a brain
• 🎥 Video: The modern lifestyle is an accident
• 🎥 Video: Six Building Blocks of Energy
• 📝 Activity: Review Energy Givers & Zappers
• 👩‍💻 Activity: Move Every Day
• 👩‍💻 Activity: Make Your Bedroom a Bed Room
• 📱 Activity: Friendly Social Jujitsu
• 📝 Activity: Geek Out on Caffeine
• 📝 Activity: Choose Your Own Adventure
• 💬 Share: Which Energize tactics work best for you?
• 💬 Share: Continue to get support for your daily Highlights

Week 5
The Big Reflect

• 🎥 Video: The Highlight Course “Graduation”
• 💬 Share: Your reflections and your plans for the future

After the course…

• Continue to share and discuss with the community
• Get forever access to the videos and course materials
• Free upgrades to new versions of the videos and course materials in the future

“Thank you for the thoughtful pacing of the lessons, text, video, and then recap. Engaging and really helpful.”   —Sarah in Texas

“The most amazing thing has been the community. Having a place to talk about the challenges in life and reading how others overcome their challenges or learn from a failed experiment is cool.” —Max in Sweden

Who is it for?

The Highlight Course is perfect for you if…

• You feel busy and distracted, and don’t have enough time for the projects and people that matter most to you.
• Your days feel like a series of reactions—to your phone, your email, and other people’s priorities.
• There are projects—small, medium, or large—you’d like to make time for, but don’t know where to start.
• There are people—your family, friends, colleagues, or neighbors—you want to spend more time with, but you feel like “life” just gets in the way.
• You’ve tried to get organized and get productive with other books, apps, and systems, but found the advice unrealistic or impractical. 

What is your time worth?

Time is our only finite resource. Assets like money, energy, and health are renewable and expanding. If you lose money, you can make more. If you get tired, you can rest and recover. If you’re weak, you can become strong.

But we only get a certain number of days to live our life—and we don’t know how many until they’re gone!

At work, your time has a specific dollar value. Whether you charge by the hour, get paid by the hour, or receive a salary, it’s a number you can calculate.

But what about your life outside of work? What is the value of those hours and experiences with the people who matter most to you?

Your time is priceless and finite, yet most people give it away freely—to distracting apps and websites, to dumb meetings that show up on the calendar, and to mindless entertainment that numbs our brains instead of reenergizing us.

Our goal with The Highlight Course is to give you back your time, and help you spend it on the people and projects that matter most every day.

When you join The Highlight Course, you won’t be alone. We have assembled an amazing team to help us deliver a truly great learning experience.

Meet the team

Make Time is not your typical time-management book, and the Highlight Course is not your typical online course. That’s why we teamed up with learning expert Erik Skogsberg to design the course. He’s got a PhD in curriculum and instruction 🤯

Julie Harris is currently the world’s only certified Make Time Coach (it’s true). In addition to coaching, she’s a writer and facilitator with a background in psychology. In other words, she’s really good at helping people make positive changes. Julie will be our community leader for The Highlight Course.

And in case you don’t already know us… hey!

We’re Jake and JZ, the bestselling authors of Sprint and Make Time. We both worked in the tech industry for a long time, as designers for Google, YouTube, Microsoft, and other companies. At Google Ventures, we developed the Design Sprint process and used it to help teams at Slack, 23andMe, Blue Bottle Coffee (and 150+ other companies) focus together on their most important challenges and opportunities. We realized that lessons from the Design Sprint could apply to everyday life, too, so in 2018 we published Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day. We’ve given talks and workshops about Make Time at Netflix, NASA (for real), the Federal Reserve (no joke), and lots of other places.

Make Time really works

The best part of this journey is hearing stories from real people who are using the Make Time framework and The Highlight Course to find focus and energy every day. And we have heard some great ones:

“The things you suggest have changed my life. I was already a phone minimalist, but your book has transformed me into an early morning person who thinks hard about her Highlight for the day and makes it count.” —Michelle in England

“Make Time is changing my relationship to my work and to stress in general. The Highlight tactic has had the single biggest impact on my ability to focus. I’m leaving the office every day feeling like I’ve moved meaningful work forward.” —Lima in San Francisco

“I just finished the course, but it’s not an end, rather a new beginning with new tactics for a more focused life.” —Sarah in Texas

“Make Time has become an essential part of my life, like brushing my teeth. I can’t really imagine living without it. I plan to keep experimenting with the tactics I’ve yet to try, and most of all, using Make Time as a way to slow down and enjoy the work I’m doing more and more.” —Connor in London

“Make Time has had a huge impact on a side project of mine. I have been working on a children’s book for years. But work was very slow and I sometimes wondered if I would finish the book before my kids were too old to read it. Enter Make Time. Since reading your book I have been working on my children’s book every night and loving it.” —Martin in Sweden

“Your book changed my life in 48 hours. I have started organizing my entire agenda around my Highlight of the day. I eliminated distractions by deleting most of the apps on my phone. I also created a new habit of using my smartphone only after the Highlight of the day is completed.” —Fred in Brazil

“Choosing a daily Highlight has helped me hush the busy bandwagon and leave the day feeling accomplished. This feeling of accomplishment leads into a more intentional evening with my kids, where we cook, clean and read together. For the first time in a long time I have both hope and a plan to accomplish the long-term goals for my life.“ —Erica in Michigan

“Make Time has really helped me put things into perspective and spend more time with family.” —Vinnie in Boston

The Make Time framework really works. And for many people, our book is all they need. But we know that for most people, reading a book and trying things on your own isn’t the best way to learn. 

Over the past two years, we’ve talked to countless people about Make Time. We’ve studied learning styles and habit science and the design of educational experiences. 

We’re taking everything we have learned and putting it into The Highlight Course.

It combines self-paced lessons, on-your-own activities, real-life practice, peer support, group accountability, and expert feedback.

The new Highlight Course is our best work yet. And we believe it will be the best way to make time for what matters to you.

FAQs

When does the course start? You can start anytime.

Where does it take place? The Highlight Course is entirely online. You can participate from any computer with an Internet connection.

When will I get access to the course? As soon as you register, you’ll get access to the course. The lessons will be released according to the schedule above.

How is the course different from the book? The book gives you the tools and tactics. With The Highlight Course, we’ll walk you through a personalized process of adopting those tools and tactics. You’ll create a healthy, sustainable habit of using the Highlight method and the rest of the Make Time framework to focus on what matters every single day. Not a one-time boost, but real changes to your daily routine. Changes that stick. The course contains more than three hours of all-new videos, exclusive worksheets, and personalized activities based on the book; a community forum with dedicated moderator; and direct access to Jake & JZ.

What if I haven’t read the book? That’s okay. We designed The Highlight Course to work for people who are totally new to Make Time. But if you have already read the book, that’s even better—the course can help you personalize the framework and establish a truly sustainable habit of using the tactics in your daily life. (We offer a special price on the book for students in the course. It’s even cheaper than Amazon!)

Can I move at my own pace? Yes! The lessons will be released once a week according to the schedule above. If you fall behind, you can easily catch up. We recommend not working ahead, because the course schedule was carefully designed for maximum learning benefit, but if you ask nicely we can accelerate your lessons 🤓

What happens after the course ends? The community forum will stay active indefinitely. You’ll continue to have access to all the videos, worksheets, and other course materials. When we upload new videos, update the course, or make other improvements, you’ll get access to that, too.

Do you offer any discounts? Yes! We offer a discount to non-profits, educators, and full-time students. Please email course@maketime.blog for more information.

Can I get my company or business to pay for this? We are not accountants, but many students have been reimbursed by their companies or claimed it as a training expense for their business.

If you have other questions, please email course@maketime.blog