Rockefeller's Daily Schedule

A few years ago, I read this John Rockefeller biography, which contains tons of wisdom that I routinely think about, including his daily routine (post-working 🤠):

• Rise at 6am and read the newspaper for an hour

• Stroll through his home and garden from 7-8am, giving money to employees

• Eat breakfast at 8am, followed at 845am by a game of numerica, which gave him time to digest his food properly

• Work on correspondence from 915-1015am

• Golf from 1015am-12pm

• Bath and rest from 1215-1pm

• Lunch and more numerica from 1-230pm

• Recline and have mail read to him from 230-3pm

• Motor from 315-515pm

• Rest again from 530-630pm

• Formal dinner, followed by more numerica from 7-9pm

• Listen to music and chat with guests from 9-10pm

• Sleep from 1030pm-6am

“Rockefeller adhered to a fixed schedule, moving through the day in a frictionless manner. He never wasted time on frivolities. Even his daily breaks were designed to conserve energy and help him to strike an ideal balance between his physical and mental forces. “It is not good to keep all the forces at tension all the time,” he said.””

While Ben Franklin’s routine has been shared online for some time, he’s not as specific as he’d need to be with today’s distractions:

Except for a few exceptions, I haven’t read or heard too many stories about people building meticulously assigning tasks to small timeframes throughout the day - every day - and actually staying on track.

Kim K. mentioned her habit a few years ago: "my days are completely micromanaged to the minute," she tells (the WSJ) of managing SKIMs, her beauty lines, filming her family's new Hulu reality series, studying for the Bar Exam and many other ventures.

And so did Dua Lipa:

As she alludes to, the trick is to fill yourself to the brim with things that you love to do and leverage this routine to get the most important things done early, enjoy your breaks, and strengthen your momentum so you start and finish days strong.

Alleviate your forces from tension, as big R might say.

Otherwise, if you’ve parts of your day left unaccounted for, it’s a vibe killer to have to continuously prioritize and motivate yourself to accomplish hard things as you also fade.

I bet we’ll see this habit become more popular in the coming years. I’ve found it gratifying when I’m successful wit it, and I’d love to hear if anyone else has tried or is interested in doing so 🤘🤘

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A few more tidbits from the book that I loved:

• “Your future hangs on every day that passes.”

• “Many people noted that Rockefeller seldom said “I” … preferring the first-person plural when discussing Standard Oil. “Don’t say that I ought to do this or that,” he preached to colleagues. “We ought to do it. Never forget that we are partners; whatever is done is for the general good of us all.” He preferred outspoken colleagues to weak-kneed sycophants and welcomed differences of opinion so long as they weren’t personalized. In their private deliberations, the Standard Oil executives, for all their swashbuckling reputation, tended to be cordial and formal. “No group of American tycoons were ever more forbidding or high and mighty publicly or more gentle and shy and retiring privately.”

• “Rockefeller engaged in strenuous rituals of austerity, and he grimly sought to simplify his life and reduce his wants. He liked to say that “a man’s wealth must be determined by the relation of his desires and expenditures to his income.’ If he feels rich on $10, and has everything else he desires, he really is rich.”

• “Rockefeller knew that he and his associates had a better knowledge of the business than anyone else. You never saw anyone so confident as he was.”

• “The word ‘fear’ is not found in my father’s vocabulary,” his son once said, “nor does he know what the sensation is.”

• “He once asked rhetorically: “do not many of us who fail to achieve big things … fail because we lack concentration? The art of concentrating the mind on the thing to be done at the proper time and to the exclusion of everything else?””

• “His employees tended to revere Rockefeller and vied to please him. As one said, “I have never heard of his equal in getting together a lot of the very best men in 1 team and inspiring each man to do his best for the enterprise...He was so big, so broad, so patient; I don’t believe a man like him comes to this world oftener than once in five or six hundred years.”

• “Rockefeller worked by subtle hints, doling out praise sparingly to employees and nudging them along. At first, he tested them exhaustively, yet once he trusted them, he bestowed enormous power upon them and didn’t intrude unless something radically misfired. “Often, the best way to develop workers - when you are sure they have character and think they have ability -- is to take them to a deep place, throw them in and make them sink or swim...they will not fail.”“

• “Part of the Standard Oil gospel was to train your subordinate to do your job. “The law of these offices: nobody does anything if he can get anybody else to do it...as soon as you can, get someone whom you can rely on, train him in the work, sit down, cock up your heels, and think out some way for the Standard Oil to make some money.””

• “Rockefeller carried himself like a man of importance.”