Tag: ceo morning routine

Many founders and CEOs are known for their high-octane morning routines. Not Jeff Bezos. The founder spends the first hours of his day “puttering.” 

“I like to read the newspaper, I like to have coffee, I like to have breakfast with my kids before they go to school. Puttering time is very important to me,” Bezos explained back in 2018. According to his wife Lauren Sanchez, his mornings still focus on slow, offline puttering today. 

Sipping your coffee while catching up on the news sounds pleasant. But Bezos doesn’t just putter around in the mornings because he’s a billionaire who can do what he pleases. In the same interview he explains that his relaxed morning routine helps him clear and center his mind so he can make high-quality decisions during the day. 

To the productivity obsessed, puttering might sound like the opposite of focused effectiveness. But psychology insists Bezos is on to something. Puttering, by definition, may be aimless and small in scale. But science is clear it can also help our brains work at their best.  

Puttering as mindfulness 

The hectic modern world means most of us spend a large portion of our time ticking through a never-ending to-do list. This frantic turning of the mental wheels can be productive. But it doesn’t leave much room for reflection, creativity, or a simple appreciation of the small pleasures of the present moment. 

Wandering around doing this and that, on the other hand, acts as a form of mindfulness. It turns off the churn in our brains for a bit, leaving space for ideas and even contentment to bubble up. 

“Puttering is a gesture of respect from our brains to our physical selves. It’s not about thinking, or reading, or producing. Instead, we take on ‘mindless tasks’ that need only the most minimal participation of the brain. We acknowledge our surroundings, consider what makes us comfortable, and tend to those things, however aimlessly,” explains author Sophia Dembling in Psychology Today. 

We grit our teeth through housework drudgery. Puttering, in contrast, is a series of low stakes wins we do for the sheer satisfaction they bring. Our attention is on the task as we do it. This present focus quiets the mind in a way that is “deeply therapeutic,” Dembling insists. 

Set “free from all constraints, my brain meandered at its own pace and in its own way, unclenching and creating space through which fresh ideas wafted. It was relaxing, refreshing, and rejuvenating,” she writes of her own puttering.  

Research supports Jeff Bezos  

Studies agree with her (and Jeff Bezos) that puttering is a low-key but effective way to center yourself. 

For one, researchers explained to volunteers that doing the dishes could act as a form of mindfulness if they simply focused on the sensory details of the task, the warmth of the bubbly water, the gleam of a clean plate. Afterwards, subjects reported that six minutes of this everyday chore reduced their nervousness by 27 percent and increased their inspiration by 25 percent. 

Puttering, it turns out, is a state of mind, a way of approaching whatever minor job is in front of us. When we tackle these tasks in this unhurried way we gain some of the same calming, creativity-boosting effects as other more formal mindfulness practices, like meditation. 

Perhaps that’s why, at least as late as 2014, Jeff Bezos also still claimed to wash the dishes himself every night. 

Puttering as anti-anxiety intervention 

“Puttering has to do with cleaning and organizing; but it isn’t those things. You begin by identifying an itch in your personal space: something like a jar that has a lot of different types of things in it, or a shelf of plates where you can see a layer of dust underneath everything,” cartoonist Sophie Lucido Johnson wrote in an ode to her husband’s gift for puttering on Medium. 

One of the great pleasures of puttering, she continues, is the joy of scratching those itches. That ability to right a minor wrong, to remind yourself that you can be effective in the world, is another science-backed benefit of Bezos-style puttering. 

“Unlike other distracting activities – such as playing computer games or watching trashy TV – puttering also has the advantage of being proactive and useful, increasing our ‘perceived control,’” explains the BBC. The small shot of agency when you organize the junk drawer, say, reduces physical markers of stress in the body, it reports.  

Feeling more in control in tiny ways, calms us down. That sets us up for larger, more difficult exercises of agency and control later. And if our puttering makes your environment a bit tidier, that’s all the better. Less visually crowded spaces, also soothe our brains, science shows. 

“In general, you see much greater brain activity as you increase the number of distracting objects within a scene,” the BBC also notes. “This may lead your brain to tire so that it struggles to maintain its focus over long periods of concentration.”

If Jeff Bezos makes time to putter, so can you

Take all this together and you have strong evidence that Jeff Bezos isn’t just enjoying his life when he’s puttering around each morning. (Though he’s probably doing that too, which is a perfectly excellent goal.) He’s also practicing a low-key, practical form of mindfulness that helps to reset and prepare his brain for the day to come. 

If a titan of industry like Bezos can justify spending time puttering each day, certainly you can give yourself permission to putter too. Your brain will probably thank you.