Optimizing Your Daily Routine

Everyone has 24 hours in a day. What makes some people successful is how they use them.

The average American lives for around 79 years, or around 28,900 days. Each of these days has 24 hours, making a total of just 693,000 hours (WaitButWhy has an excellent visualization). The relative shortness of our lives means that one of the most important questions to ask yourself is how am I managing my time to best achieve my goals?

To learn from some great examples of time management, let’s look at the daily schedules of two different people—300 years apart, yet both brilliant and successful. One is polymath and Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, and the other is MIT AI researcher and podcaster Lex Fridman. Why these two? Their schedules are well-documented, relatively easy to follow, and surprisingly similar.

Benjamin Franklin

It’s difficult to think of a more accomplished person in history than Benjamin Franklin. Born in poverty in Boston in 1706, he only received two years of formal schooling. At age 17, he ran away to Philadelphia to become an apprentice in a print shop. At 22, he founded the print shop that would make him wealthy as publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette and Poor Richard’s Almanack. Over the next sixty-two years of his life, he would found the American Philosophical Society, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Library Company, and the Union Fire Company; discover that electricity has positive and negative charges and that lightning is electricity; invent the lightning rod, Franklin stove, and bifocals; write for decades; and become a leading American Founding Father, diplomat, governor of Pennsylvania, and Postmaster General.

It’s not surprising that Franklin created a daily routine to manage his various responsibilities. What may be surprising is that his daily routine is divided into just six blocks.

5 AM - 8 AM: Rise, wash, and address Powerful Goodness! Contrive day’s business, and take the resolution of the day; prosecute the present study, and breakfast.

8 AM - 12 PM: Work.

12 PM - 2 PM: Read, or look over my accounts, and dine.

2 PM - 6 PM: Work.

6 PM - 9 PM: Put things in their places. Supper. Music or diversion, or conversation. Examination of the day.

10 PM - 5 AM: Sleep.

Lex Fridman

Lex Fridman was born in the Soviet Union in 1983, and immigrated to the United States 11 years later. He received a BS and MS in computer science and a PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Drexel University, leaving school in 2014. He worked for Google for a year as a machine learning researcher, then became a research scientist and lecturer at MIT. In 2018, he started the Lex Fridman Podcast, which now boasts 2.21 million subscribers on YouTube with 334 episodes and counting. Outside of academia, he plays the guitar and piano, has a black belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu, and enjoys reading and cooking.

His schedule is blocked into just a few sections.

Morning Routine: After waking up and getting ready, Lex reads a printout of his “morning mantra”. This includes reminding himself of his rules and constraints (limit social media, exercise and eat well daily, get 6-8 hours of sleep a night, etc.), gratitude, reflecting on death, listing his long-term and short-term goals, visualizing the day ahead, and his core principles (compassion, empathy, love, character, integrity, and strength).

Deep Work Session 1: After drinking water and coffee and using the bathroom, Lex spends four hours doing the deepest work of the day with no distractions—no phone, no social media, nothing apart from the task at hand. If a thought comes up, he writes it on a Google Doc and goes back to work.

Break: 5-10 minutes checking social media, 20 minutes playing music.

Exercise: An hour and a half to two hours of exercise: running at least 6 miles while listening to an audiobook, and some intense bodyweight exercise (5 pull-ups and 10 push-ups a minute for at least 15-20 minutes). Lex exercises in a fasted state and doesn’t eat breakfast or lunch.

Deep Work Session 2: After a cold shower, Lex spends another four hours doing deep work with no distractions.

Dinner: Lex eats a keto meal once a day, usually organic, grass-fed beef and cauliflower or carrots, along with electrolytes and a multivitamin drink.

Shallow Work Session: This four-hour session can include deep work, but is generally the time when Lex focuses on email, video/podcast editing, web design, and other shallow work. If Lex isn’t feeling great, he watches Netflix or YouTube documentaries or hangs out with friends during this time.

Reading: Lex spends at least two hours reading—one hour of academic papers and one hour of “fun” reading: fiction or nonfiction. He then takes a pause to focus on gratitude, and sleeps for 6-8 hours.

Putting It All Together

You may have noticed that Lex Fridman and Benjamin Franklin have surprisingly similar habits. Franklin’s “Powerful Goodness” is highly reminiscent of Lex’s morning mantra and gratitude, and both plan their day’s activities in the morning. Both dedicate significant portions of the day to deep, focused work sessions. Both spend time reading, including on things unrelated to the day’s work, contributing to their intellectual range. So how can we learn from their routines?

• Let no time go to waste. Every waking minute, whether it’s work, reading, exercise, eating, or recreation, should be accounted for. This doesn’t mean there’s no time for leisure, but scheduling prevents time from being wasted on activities like scrolling through social media or procrastinating. As Franklin says, “trouble springs from idleness, and grievous toil from needless ease.”

• Make your default activity productive. When most people find themselves with nothing to do, they gravitate towards mindless entertainment: TV if you’re older or TikTok if you’re younger (I’m guilty of doing this more than I’d like to admit). Instead, focus on changing this “default activity” to reading or working on something productive.

• Keep your schedule flexible, but not empty. Lex’s “shallow work session”, for example, can encompass everything from deep work to shallow work to pure recreation, depending on the tasks of the day and his mood. On some days you can work for hours, and on others you may need more rest, and shallow work allows for that.

• Incorporate self-awareness into your day. “Self-awareness” refers to anything involving reflection. Both Lex and Franklin took time each day to reflect on what they were grateful for (something proven to benefit your physical and mental health), as well as planning the day’s tasks in the morning and reflecting on what went well and poorly in the evening.

• And most importantly, work, read, sleep well, eat well, and exercise every day.

As Franklin says, “Lost time is never found again”. Managing time well is key to living a successful life—and Lex Fridman and Benjamin Franklin’s routines serve as excellent case studies.