Daily Routine

Daily Routines is one of my favorite sites. Nobody seems to have any idea what I do so I thought I’d put mine down.

I get up between 9 and 10 and check my blackberry to see if anything important went down while I was sleeping. If there wasn’t an emergency (there usually is), I shower and put on jeans and a white t-shirt. If there was, I could end up spending the next two or three hours on the phone, pacing in my apartment. I don’t eat breakfast. I try to get to the office before twelve so there is parking, spending some time with my RSS reader and responding to emails before I leave. I make sure to read Buzzmachine, Transworld Business, Valleywag and my delicious inbox. The Wall St Journal comes every morning which adds nothing to my day but an extra trip to the trash.

At the office, I check in with my assistant to see how to projects he’s working on are going. I normally haven’t explained them well, so we spend some time fixing it. ______ has probably called me a few times by this point with new directions to take things on or ideas to flesh out. These get split up and delegated. I read at lunch and when I get back to my desk if it’s good. The rest of the day is spent talking to reporters, approving ads, phone calls and monitoring the Google and RSS alerts that let me pretend I’m everywhere at all times. I try to leave the office around 7 or 8.

Dinner with the girlfriend. An episode of House. Read for an hour. Run for 35 minutes. Jump rope after if there is time. If I wrote or worked something out in my head while I was running then I transfer it to text quickly before I shower. Emails to people as stuff comes up. Hang out. She goes to bed with dog around 12. I get back up and work until 2 or so. Reading or catching up on whatever I was too busy to get to during the day. I send the emails that I’ll get responses to in the morning. Send a To Do list to my assistant while he’s asleep to work on while I am asleep. ______ is normally still up, even on the east coast, so we talk again before I wrap up and go to bed.

Written by Ryan Holiday
Ryan Holiday is the bestselling author of Trust Me, I’m Lying, The Obstacle Is The Way, Ego Is The Enemy, and other books about marketing, culture, and the human condition. His work has been translated into thirty languages and has appeared everywhere from the Columbia Journalism Review to Fast Company. His company, Brass Check, has advised companies such as Google, TASER, and Complex, as well as Grammy Award winning musicians and some of the biggest authors in the world. He lives in Austin, Texas.