What Jeff Bezos Says About Sleep

Imagine two different entrepreneurs running multi-billion businesses.

The first CEO wakes up with the dawn every day to clean up his email box and make tons of “important decisions.” It takes up his whole day. You wonder how long he might live in this pace and if there is another way to manage his business. He answers: “No, I am a CEO. It is my job to do it.” Fair enough, he is in charge, and he might know better. You wish him luck!

Another guy delegates most of his work to his employees and shows up to make several decisions a day. There is no rush; he looks fresh and calm. You ask what’s his secret, and listen to what he says:

“Well, I sleep 8 hours a day. It helps me to think better. I have more energy and my mood is better.” — Jeff Bezos, discussion at the Economic Club of Washington in 2018.

Jeff Bezos is a founder of the multi-national e-commerce store Amazon. He is the wealthiest person in the world, according to the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires ranking. Bezos manages to be an effective entrepreneur and a lovely father while prioritizing 8 hours of sleep.

If a busy owner of the world’s famous company has enough hours in a day, why most people fail in time management? Perhaps, they don’t find it essential, or they have no clue how to schedule days effectively.

Here is what Jeff Bezos shares about sleep that might help you manage your time effectively.

“You only have to make a small number of high-quality decisions.”

Let’s get some math done.

If you cut four hours from your sleep, you’ll get four extra hours to do something. You might get up earlier and use this time before the whole world wakes up, or you might go to sleep much later than usual. In total, you will get 16 productive hours a day. It might be a dream come true for some people.

However, don’t rush to switch your daily habits yet. Here is what Jeff Bezos says about sleep deprivation:

“4 extra productive hours in a day is 33% more time to make decisions. In other words, if you were going to make, say, 100 decisions, you could make 33 more. So, 133 decisions in total.

But is that really worth it if the quality of those decisions might be lower because you’re tired or grouchy or any number of things? Probably not.

You need to be thinking two or three years in advance, and if you are, then why do you need to make a hundred decisions today?”

You indeed get a few spare hours if you shortchange your sleep, according to Bezos. However, it won’t help you get more productive! That productivity is just an illusion.

A clear mind is vital for those who work in creative fields, make strategic decisions, and shape humans’ lives. Those people make tons of decisions a day, where their quality is far more critical than the quantity.

Warren Buffett, however, claims he is fine if he makes three good decisions a year.

Well, I am definitely not the one who’s going to judge Warren Buffett. But I am sure people make many more decisions a day.

Research studies claim that people, on average, make roughly 35,000 decisions a day, both conscious and impulsive. That’s stunning!

If you make that many important decisions that shape your present and future, you have to be in a good mood and health.

People who are shorting themselves on sleep become more impulsive make riskier decisions without realizing it. That’s what a research study with two independent experiments has confirmed.

You might think that it’s impossible to sleep long enough and still manage everything. However, if Bezos can, you too can and should be productive without sacrificing your sleep.

What makes 8 hours of sleep possible for Bezos

Getting a healthy night’s sleep isn’t always easy in our modern, fast, and stressful world. You quite often can say if you did not sleep well. However, discovering why it happens is way more challenging.

Researchers claim you should be eager to follow minimum requirements to get a healthy sleep every day. Overeating, staying up late, and waking up at midday won’t serve you well.

Instead, a proper sleep schedule and good stress management are two key things to start with if your sleep quality needs to get better.

According to Jeff Bezos, a key secret to healthy sleep is your daily routine — how you manage to organize your days and if it eventually helps you set yourself for success.

Here is a short excerpt from Jeff Bezos’s book called "Invent & Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos,” where he describes how his daily routine looks like:

“I like to putter in the morning.

I get up early. I go to bed early. I like to read the newspaper. I like to have coffee. I like to have breakfast with my kids before they go to school.

So my puttering time is very important to me. That’s why I set my first meeting for ten o’clock.”

Notice, Jeff Bezos does not cram everything into a single day despite being an extremely busy man. He gives a powerful lesson to this world, where most productivity gurus try to teach you how to get more and more things done.

As Haemin Sunim, a Zen monk, once put it well in his book:

“When your mind is noisy, the world is as well. And when your mind is peaceful, the world is, too.”

Working on the edge of your abilities won’t make you wealthy and happier. Yes, you might earn more, but is sacrificing your health and well-being worths it?

It’s been more than five years since I quit working at night. However, I still experience side effects. I was in my 20s when I felt like an elderly.

The long-term effects of sleep deprivation are unavoidable! No matter how old you are now, it is never too late to take your health under control. After all, if you are alive, you are capable of everything!

Final thoughts

Why rush and make unsolicited decisions? You never know how they will impact your future.

Successful people don’t like uncertainty. Just like Bezos, they work hard today to create a better tomorrow. They know that pure freedom of choice and life is impossible without time, energy, and money.

Life energy is a scarce resource; it is finite. The more you have it, the longer you will remain mentally and physically alive.

If sleep is one tiny component to feel better and make high-quality decisions — add it to your must-do daily routine.

Your future self will thank you!