As opposed to theory of many of the world’s most successful people surviving on no sleep, making thousands of decisions a day and having no time for themselves, Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man with a net worth of $181.4billion, has said the key to success is eight hours of sleep a night, making three key choices a day and having all his important meetings before lunch.
The Amazon founder and CEO penned an essayabout how he makes decisions in his new book Invent and Wander, which was released last week.
Bezos opened by explaining how he lays the groundwork for decision-making: getting a full eight hours and then allowing time for what he calls ‘puttering’ in the morning – having breakfast with his kids, making coffee, reading the newspaper.
By 10am, he’s ready to take on what he calls his ‘high-IQ’ meetings of the day. And when the clock hits 5pm, he shelves anything ‘high IQ’ until tomorrow.
Bezos said he’s able to fit everything into that seven-hour window because he knows how to prioritize.
‘Think about it: As a senior executive, what do you really get paid to do? You get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions. Your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day,’ he wrote.
Instead, Bezos said he tries to make only a few decisions each day, focusing on things that won’t come to fruition until a few years later.
‘When I have a good quarterly conference call with Wall Street, people will stop me and say, “Congratulations on your quarter,” and I say, “Thank you,” but what I’m really thinking is that quarter was baked three years ago,’ he wrote.
‘Right now I’m working on a quarter that’s going to reveal itself in 2023 sometime, and that’s what you need to be doing.
‘You need to be thinking two or three years in advance, and if you are, then why do I need to make a hundred decisions today?
‘If I make, like, three good decisions a day, that’s enough, and they should just be as high quality as I can make them.’
Bezos goes on to explain how he speeds up the process by splitting decisions into two categories he calls ‘one-way-door’ and ‘two-way-door’.
‘There are decisions that are irreversible and highly consequential; we call them one-way doors, or Type 2 decisions. They need to be made slowly and carefully,’ he wrote.
‘I often find myself at Amazon acting as the chief slowdown officer: “Whoa, I want to see that decision analyzed seventeen more ways because it’s highly consequential and irreversible.”
‘The problem is that most decisions aren’t like that. Most decisions are two-way doors. You can make the decision, and you step through. It turns out to have been the wrong decision; you can back up.’
It’s likely that Bezos has faced a multitude of tricky decisions in recent months as Amazon gears up for a busy holiday season that is expected to see online sales spike 33 percent to a record $189billion, according to Adobe Analytics.
Amazon is now urging shoppers to pick up packages at stores as large shippers like FedEx and UPS warn of potential delivery delays exacerbated by the pandemic.
The firm is offering pickup at delivery locations in more than 900 cities across the US via Amazon Hub.
