Make Time's highlight method, and what a scheduler can't do with it

The argument, in one paragraph

Make Time (2018) claims busyness is manufactured by two forces: a work culture where a full calendar reads as seriousness, and apps engineered to be refilled forever. Neither yields to trying harder, so the book offers tactics (dozens of them, explicitly meant to be tried and discarded) for choosing one thing a day and defending it. The authors spent years at Google building the attention economy they are describing, which gives the book its credibility and its guilt.

The highlight method in practice

Each morning, choose a single highlight: the one thing that, done, would make the day feel worth it. Not necessarily the most urgent thing: the book suggests choosing by urgency, satisfaction, or joy, and rotating among them. Then give the highlight a specific hour on your calendar. An intention with no time attached is not a plan; the calendar is where an intention either becomes real or quietly does not. The rest of the book's tactics (the phone made boring, the television made deliberate) exist to protect that one block.

Where the book disagrees with automatic scheduling

The book is sceptical of optimisation as such. A tool that fills your gaps efficiently is close kin to the disease it diagnoses: a fuller calendar, faster. Its authors would say the highlight must be chosen by hand, by feel, each morning, and that a day packed tight by software is a day nobody actually chose. They would tolerate a narrow reading of Diarized: let software schedule the obligations, so the hours it cannot see stay yours. We think that narrow reading is the correct use of us, and the dashboard's own advice (keep working hours short, let deadlines breathe) leans the same way.