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Three Books That Changed How I Work and Live: Lessons from Essentialism, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, and Make Time

As part of our goal to have more short posts with quick takeaways, today I’m sharing some key insights from a few books that have had a huge impact on my thinking around work, life, and productivity. Here’s a quick roundup of some practical lessons from Essentialism by Greg McKeown (Book Review: Essentialism), So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport (Book Review: So good they can’t ignore you), and Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky (Book Review: Make Time). They all have been previously discussed on this blog in more depth.

Key Takeaways from Essentialism by Greg McKeown

  1. Do less than you want to do – similar to the workout idea of “leave one in the bar.”
  2. Don’t overwork – only do as much in a day or week as you can recover from within that day or week. This modified version is actually from his second book, Effortless, that I think I also did not write a book review about, but I’ve read multiple times and maybe I should make a book review about it.
  3. Protect the asset (yourself) by getting enough sleep, fun, play, and active rest (not passive doomscrolling or binge-watching). This will help you finish the stress cycle.
  4. Take real breaks – for example, have a full day off in nature on weekends with no digital distractions.
  5. Strictly separate work and free time – don’t work in the evenings.
  6. Not allowing yourself to work overtime forces you to make hard but useful triage decisions to live an essentialist life where you have to accept the trade-offs and the reality that you just can’t do it all.
  7. Physically put your phone away as often as possible.
  8. Stay offline for the first 10 minutes of the day to start intentionally.
  9. Work in process-based time blocks, not only product-focused ones, and use time blocking strategies. (“Process not product” is from Barbara Oakley, I think, but I also mention it in Why I’m disappointed by Slow Productivity [Book Review])

Key Takeaways from So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport

  1. Adopt the craftsman mindset – focus on getting excellent at your job rather than blindly chasing your passion.
  2. Avoid the passion hypothesis – don’t assume your dream job will come from just following passion.
  3. Build rare and valuable skills (career capital) to gain more freedom and mission in your job.
  4. Understand the control trap – until you have strong skills, you can’t negotiate real freedom.
  5. Accumulate career capital by developing rare and valuable skills, which you can trade for greater autonomy and purpose.
  6. Follow the law of financial viability – pursue careers where your best skills are in demand and that people are actually willing to pay for.
  7. Test ideas with small bets – low-risk experiments in time, money, and energy.
  8. Explore the adjacent possible – innovation happens just next to the current cutting edge.
  9. Focus on remarkability – create work so notable that others naturally remark on it.
  10. Use deliberate practice – systematically practice skills to continuously improve (concept also discussed in Peak by Anders Ericsson, which I reviewed on my other blog: How to use Deliberate Practice to reach your Peak [Book Review]).

Key Takeaways from Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky

  1. Recognize and resist the busy bandwagon and infinity pools – constant distraction is the default, but it doesn’t have to be your default.
  2. Create intentional inconvenience – log out of apps, unsubscribe from Netflix, remove browser shortcuts.
  3. Use friction to your advantage – make digital distractions harder to access to rely less on self-control.
  4. Disable notifications – cut out interruptions at the source. (Many people are dumbfounded by this idea and think they can’t just do that. However, I haven’t had notifications on my phone for years and I’m doing just fine. You just need to make sure you check all relevant sources of information at adequate intervals, like once a day or once a week, for example. Believe me, it works. I don’t even have work email on my phone anymore since 2023. I really don’t miss it.)
  5. Consider more radical steps – like switching to a dumb phone or disconnecting from the internet when you don’t need it. (I have tried both during my digital minimalism experiment a few years back, i.e. before the pandemic derailed all my efforts, and found them as fascinating as I found them unsustainable over the long run.)
  6. Energize yourself by exercising daily – aim for around 45 minutes to boost energy and wellbeing.

In Make Time, the authors talk about doomscrolling, the busy bandwagon, and infinity pools—all things that stress us out and basically make us miss our lives because they have become our default way of spending time. What they suggest is that you need to get out of that default mode. Just because something like doomscrolling is the default setting in an app doesn’t mean you can’t switch that functionality off if you know it’s better for you.

To spend less time on your devices, they recommend creating intentional inconvenience, such as logging out of apps so that you can’t instantly access them, or even making it impossible to log in easily on your phone. Other suggestions include adding friction or barriers, like physically putting your phone away, unsubscribing from Netflix, switching off the internet, getting a dumb phone, or simply disabling notifications. These are ways to make digital distractions less accessible without having to rely on constant self-control. Another example they give is to stop watching the news altogether, which can also drastically reduce your exposure to unnecessary stress and distraction (as well as protecting your mental health).

If you’ve read any of these books (or have them on your list), I’d love to hear your biggest takeaway or favorite trick you’ve applied in real life. Have you tried any of the tips above? Feel free to share it in the comments!


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Sarah Lang (May 31, 2025). Three Books That Changed How I Work and Live: Lessons from Essentialism, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, and Make Time. Epigrammetry. Retrieved June 14, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/1419r


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