Every week, I share one key idea from my work at the intersection of cognitive high performance, human flourishing, and sustainable excellence. Welcome to MakeTimeFlow - dedicated to helping visionary, family-focused founders and leaders optimize their time, to act and achieve deep success.

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Hi Reader,

There's a particular feeling that shows up every June.

You're half-present at the cookout, or by the water with your laptop open, telling yourself you'll really unplug next week.

Summer brings longer days and a built-in permission to slow down, and unless you're intentional about it, you may spend it doing exactly what you do all year - pushing through the stream of constant demand for your attention.

That's the tension: you hope for enough open space on your calendar to enjoy summer, maybe even finally sink into a passion project you've been circling all year, but work feels relentless.

What if you could keep making progress in all your important projects while still making time for a rich summer?

There’s an approach I call ‘intense commitment with optimal effort’: knowing what will move the needle, and then optimizing your time and effort for that. The Pareto Principle is based on the observation that 80% of meaningful results often come from 20% of your effort. It's a prioritization lens that forces the question of which small set of inputs is actually driving most of the result, and then making sure your time is going to those.

It is possible to design your summer so that you create the impact you want in a single day’s worth of effort per week while still making time to flow with life activities around you.

The Definition of Deep Success

The idea of Deep Success is built around six life domains that research shows matter for real flourishing: physical health, positive emotions, meaningful relationships, engagement and flow in your work, a sense of purpose, and genuine achievement. When those are in balance and moving forward together, that’s Deep Success.

Meanwhile, the economic and political systems around you are designed to extract as much of your time and attention as possible, and they’ve never been more sophisticated or incessant.

Your phone, your inbox, algorithms designed by teams of engineers to keep you scrolling - they’re all competing for your focus with a precision that previous generations never faced. Yet, you’re expected to be available 24/7, respond instantly, and somehow maintain a life outside of work.

Without intentionality, you drift. You end up scrolling social longer than you wanted to, working more hours than you planned, missing experiences with people you love, neglecting your health, feeling disconnected from what you actually value. Over months and years, the cost compounds - burnout, regret, relationships that suffer, health that deteriorates. Lots of effort spent on the 80%, while the real goals remain elusive.

Deep Success matters now because reclaiming your time and attention - choosing what you focus on rather than having it chosen for you - has become a rare and valuable skill. This is not about productivity hacks, but about having the clarity and discipline to protect what matters most, and the systems to actually live that way consistently.

How to practice being intentional in a world designed to make you reactive

Three main things working together. Summer may be a great time to set this up:

1. First, you need a system that captures and organizes everything from your mind: your tasks, goals, calendar, reflections - all in one place so your brain isn’t holding it all. That offloading and clarity change everything. Your stress lowers because you can see what actually matters versus what’s just noise. I like David Allen’s saying that your mind is for having ideas, not holding them. His core point is that you can't trust your own head to hold your commitments reliably (not to mention how stress-inducing that is), so you need a trusted external system where every task and commitment is captured, organized, and reviewed regularly. Once you genuinely trust that system to surface the right things at the right time, your mind can relax and focus on actually doing the work rather than nagging you about what you might be forgetting.
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2. Second, intentional time blocks. You decide what gets your best hours - your deep work, your family, your health - and you protect those blocks. Not as nice-to-haves, but as commitments to building immeasurable true wealth in life. As trivial as this may sound, using a timer (of any kind) is a deceptively powerful investment tool; it helps you set an intention for your time, then relax into focus, knowing it’ll alert you when time is up. It helps you build the habit of focused attention. It helps you avoid rabbit holes. It creates structure for an invisible yet precious resource.
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3. Third, a framework for measuring things that matter. Write success stories for your quarter and year. Track your most important outcomes. Run tiny experiments to try out new habits. Assess your life across core domains - health, relationships, purpose, engagement, emotions, achievement - so you’re not optimizing just one area at the expense of everything else, but trying to flourish a little across the board.

The whole thing works because it’s built on two principles: you need to be intentional about time (most people aren’t), and you need to see the connection between your daily actions and your bigger life vision (most systems don’t show that).

This isn’t really about managing tasks or time, although on the surface that’s what you’re doing. You’re designing and flowing through a life where your daily work actually serves what matters to you - your Deep Success.

— Narath

P.S. For summer specifically, here’s a practice you can try: Write out what a successful summer looks like for you across work, relationships, health, and meaning. Not vague goals, but specific outcomes. Then every Sunday, read the story and check if you’re on track. This keeps you intentional instead of reactive. If you want a tool, check out the new ‘Stories’ feature in MakeTimeFlow (which is free to try for two weeks). Read our LinkedIn post about Success Story Priming here.

Dr. Narath Carlile is a Harvard-trained physician, executive coach, and founder of MakeTimeFlow — a human performance company supporting visionary founders, executives, and leaders building extraordinary lives and families. MakeTimeFlow is a Public Benefit Corporation based in Boston.

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Research Sources:

• ​State of the Global Workplace Report - Gallup​
• VanderWeele, Tyler J. "On the Promotion of Human Flourishing." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), vol. 114, no. 31 (August 1, 2017): 8148–8156. doi:10.1073/pnas.1702996114.
• Seligman, Martin E. P. Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being. New York: Free Press, 2011.
• Bloom, Jessica de, Sabine A.E. Geurts, Sabine Sonnentag, Toon Taris, Carolina de Weerth, and Michiel A.J. Kompier. “How Does a Vacation from Work Affect Employee Health and Well-Being?” Psychology & Health 26, no. 12 (December 1, 2011): 1606–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/08870446.2010.546860.
• Allen, David. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. New York: Penguin Books, 2001 (rev. ed. 2015).