Bill Gates: Daily Routine

Once fueled by all-nighters and caffeine, Bill Gates now swears by sleep, morning workouts, and a nightly dishwashing wind-down.

As the years have gone by, Bill Gates has gone from regularly pulling all-nighters while building Microsoft to understanding, and advocating, the importance of sleep.

“Once or twice, I stayed up two nights in a row. I knew I wasn’t as sharp when I was operating mostly on caffeine and adrenaline, but I was obsessed with my work, and I felt that sleeping a lot was lazy,” he wrote on his blog. Today, Gates regularly gets at least seven hours of sleep per night. A lot has changed in the past few decades. In a 2018 self-reflection blog post about what he learned at work that year, Gates wrote:

Today of course I still assess the quality of my work. But I also ask myself a whole other set of questions about my life. Did I devote enough time to my family? Did I learn enough new things? Did I develop new friendships and deepen old ones? These would have been laughable to me when I was 25, but as I get older, they are much more meaningful.

Upon waking up, how does one of the world’s richest people spend his day? Although Bill Gates’ daily routine can be widely varied, there are certain rituals and habits that he sticks to every day.