As a company's steer holder, the CEO or founder takes plenty of pressure ordinary people even cannot imagine. They usually need to deal with different aspects of daily operation of a company including technology, business, marketing, public relationship etc. Lots of meetings, negotiations and presentations are waiting for them every day. Hence time is a precious resource for them. Let's take a look at how these CEOs spend their time in their work.
1. Apple CEO Tim Cook
- Gets up at 3:45 am
- Starts to read and reply emails at 4:30 am
- Goes to gym at 5 o'clock
- Leaves the office very late
- No time to take annual leaves because his busy schedule. His OT pay is hundreds of thousands of dollars each year
2. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs
- Gets up at 6 am since 1999
- Does some body exercise and work for a while
- Eats breakfast with family and watches kids to go to school
- Spends his mornings in face-to-face meetings with his product and management teams
- Spends his afternoons in the design lab with Apple’s top designer Jony Ive
- Spends his evenings sitting around the long wooden table in the kitchen at his home in Palo Alto, California, having dinner with his wife and kids.
3. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
- Although he is the CEO of the fast growing social giant, his schedule is more like a programmer
- When people are sleeping, he is still working. While people have gone home, he is still working
- Works 10-12 hours a day and it's not uncommon that stays until 6 am in the morning
- Spends an hour learning Chinese(though not sure whether he is still doing that)
- Reads a book every other week
- Thinks about Facebook 24/7
- Checks Facebook all day long though doesn't post all the time
- Spends a significant amount of time reading about successful people
- Travels very often
- Walks his dog often
4. Tesla CEO Elon Musk
- 6 to 6.5 hours sleep on average
- Gets up at 7am normally and sleep late, usually at 1am
- The general schedule for a week will be
- Sunday: Travel if necessary. Spend time at Bel Air mansion.
- Monday: Work at SpaceX in Hawthorne. Take private jet to Silicon Valley. Crash at a friend’s place.
- Tuesday: Work at Tesla’s offices in Palo Alto and/or factory in Fremont.
- Wednesday: Work at Tesla’s offices in Palo Alto and/or factory in Fremont.
- Thursday: Fly back to Los Angeles. Work at SpaceX.
- Friday: Work at SpaceX.
- Saturday: Work at SpaceX and/or spend time with five young sons he shares custody with first wife Justine (has them four days each week).
5. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey
- 18 hours work a day
- Spends 4 hours every Monday at each company, meeting both leadership teams to make sure everything is under control
- Focuses on reviewing the product teams and recruiting
- Has follow-up meetings on Wednesdays and Fridays to check up on their weekly progress
6. Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma
- Gets up between 8:30 and 9:30 in the morning
- Stays very late and work long hours a day
- Admires Silicon Valley spirit where people don't stick to 8am - 5pm time schedule
- Focus on long term development strategy of Alibaba. Refraining away from day-to-day operation of Alibaba
7. Tencent CEO Pony Ma
- Works till after 12am
- Sends emails to managers at 3am
- Has lots of questions to PMs every day, so people need to stay with him and work late to resolve problems.
From their story, it's clear that their success doesn't just come in random. They dedicated too much to what they love and created something that changes the world.
really?