Coaching practices for Make Time Method

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Make Time Method, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I know what the one important thing is, but I keep leaving it for "later when I have time," and later never comes
• I know what my priorities are, but they live on a list while my calendar fills up with everyone else’s meetings
• There’s one thing I genuinely care about doing, and every single day it gets pushed to "after I clear everything else"
• The things that actually matter to me only ever get the scraps of time left after everyone else’s urgent stuff is handled
• Every hour of my week is booked back-to-back, so the moment anything runs over the whole day cascades into lateness and panic

Practices that may help

1. Make Time, Made Practical
   Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky’s system runs on a simple daily loop — Highlight, Laser, Energy, Reflect — designed to defend one meaningful priority a day against the pull of "Busy Bandwagon" culture and "Infinity Pool" apps. The components rest on solid ideas about attention, friction, and energy, though the framework is a designer’s synthesis rather than a tested protocol.
2. Make time before the day fills
   Block time for the Highlight first, so it isn’t left to leftover scraps of the day.
   Make Time, Made Practical
3. Schedule rocks in your calendar before anything else
   Block time for your rocks in the first planning step — before reactive commitments fill the day.
   The Pickle Jar Theory of Time Management
4. Time Blocking, Made Practical
   Time blocking means assigning every hour of your day to a specific task on the calendar, so you decide in advance what attention goes where. The core levers — pre-commitment, protecting deep work from shallow work, and confronting how finite your time really is — are well grounded, though the practice demands honest re-planning when reality diverges from the plan.
5. Pay yourself first — with time
   Take time for what matters off the top, before the day’s demands consume it.
   Four Thousand Weeks, Made Practical
6. Values-based scheduling
   Block time for purpose-aligned activities before reactive obligations fill the calendar.
   Purpose Anchors: Keeping Meaning Accessible Day to Day
7. Protecting unscheduled time
   Leave deliberate gaps in the calendar instead of filling every hour.
   Slow Living, Made Practical
8. Highlight: choose one priority
   Each morning, pick a single most-meaningful thing you want to make time for today.
   Make Time, Made Practical
9. The Time Audit
   Laura Vanderkam argues that most people do not have a time shortage but a time-awareness problem: they underestimate how much discretionary time exists in 168 weekly hours. A time audit — tracking actual time use for a week — almost always reveals significant gaps between perceived and actual allocation, which is the foundation for intentional redesign. The method is straightforward; the hard part is using what you find.
10. Calendar time blocking
    Give every task a specific start and end time on your calendar.
    Time Blocking, Made Practical

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