Making time for what matters | Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky (authors of Sprint and Make Time, co-founders of Character Capital)

**Jake Knapp** (0:00)
So it's not really about productivity. It's not about time management. It's really just about, look, in any given day, we're lucky if we can have one great moment where we have our peak attention and we use it well. And it's not gonna happen every day, but if we have some intention around it, it can happen more often than not. The notion what the highlight is, imagine it's the end of the day, if someone asks you, what was the highlight of your day?
What would you say? That's the anchor of everything. That's the core, that's the foundation.
Things can sometimes be a mess outside of that and you still feel really good about your days. You still feel really good about the way you're spending your energy.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:37)
Today, I've got two guests, Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky. Jake and John are authors of two incredible books, Sprint and Make Time. With Sprint, they've helped more than 300 teams design new products and bring them to market, including teams at YouTube, Slack, Gusto, and One Medical. Previously, John and Jake worked at Google Ventures, and before that at Google, where John was a leader on Google Ads and YouTube, and Jake helped build Gmail and co-founded Google Meet. Today, they run a venture capital firm called Character, and they actually just opened up applications for their accelerator program called Character Labs, which you can learn more about at character.bc slash labs. In our conversation, we focus on their more recent book, Make Time, which a guest of this podcast, Ben Williams, recommended in the lightning round, and I absolutely loved and wanted to make sure more people learned about it and the advice within it, especially product leaders and founders who are constantly looking for ways to be more productive. I wanna get you right to the meat of the conversation, so let me just say that we get into a ton of very practical pieces of advice for how you can be more productive in your day. And if you listen to this episode, I guarantee you'll find at least three things that you'll want to start doing differently starting tomorrow. With that, I bring you Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky after a short word from our sponsors.
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Jake and John, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Jake Knapp** (4:17)
Thanks for having us. I was so stoked to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:19)
I was just re-listening to the audiobook of Make Time to prep for this conversation. And I feel like I kind of know you guys from listening to your voice for so long in the car.