Jeff Bezos does not jam-pack his schedule or set strict time blocks for all his conferences.
Instead, the 60-year-old Amazon and Blue Origin founder — at the moment the second-richest particular person on the planet, according to Forbes — provides himself and his groups ample time for artistic considering, he told the “Lex Fridman Podcast.”
“I don’t keep to a strict schedule,” Bezos stated, in an episode first launched in December 2023. “My meetings often go longer than I plan for them to, because I believe in [mind] wandering.”
For instance, Bezos makes time throughout conferences for folks to bounce concepts off one another, regardless of how small or spontaneous, he stated — a course of he referred to as a “messy meeting.” Those classes often do not have a set finish time, he added.
“When I sit down [in] a meeting, I don’t know how long the meeting is going to take if we’re trying to solve a problem,” Bezos stated. “The reality is we may have to wander for a long time … I think there’s certainly nothing more fun than sitting at a whiteboard with a group of smart people and spit-balling and coming up with new ideas and objections to those ideas, and then solutions to the objections and going back and forth.”
He added that “a lot of people feel like wandering is inefficient,” however studies show that a divergent thoughts can really boost a particular person’s productivity, creativity and happiness.
Mind wandering vs. time blocking
Some productivity consultants swear by the time blocking methodology, which includes blocking out particular quantities of time in your calendar for each process you want to accomplish every day — generally even together with meal breaks and occasional chats.
But the technique can depart you feeling stressed and burned out, Yale University psychology professor Laurie Santos informed attendees at SXSW in March. Meanwhile, a 2016 study of greater than 200 school college students discovered that their creativity considerably improved when permitting their minds to wander.
If you are the sort of one that will get overwhelmed by a packed schedule, carving out time to permit your thoughts to wander might allow you to give you concepts you may not have thought of on a extra structured schedule — supplied you do it successfully fairly than merely zoning out, psychologist Jill Suttie wrote for the University of California Berkeley’s “Greater Good” journal in 2018.
When a downside arises within the office or in school, take a while that is free from distractions — like your telephone or a string of unread emails — and take a look at to give you an array of options, each huge and small, then bounce them off of your colleagues to spherical them out, Suttie wrote. It might sound counterintuitive, however taking a break out of your work routine to let your thoughts wander can generally be the simplest method to resolve a downside that is in any other case left you feeling caught.
“Under the right circumstances, a wandering mind may actually benefit us and possibly those around us,” Suttie wrote. “The trick is to know when to set your mind free.”
Bezos’ method to thoughts wandering
Bezos lets his thoughts wander to contemplate the professionals and cons of his personal concepts. Once they’ve survived his personal “first level of scrutiny,” he presents them to others for a productive group brainstorm to assist the thought take form.
For Bezos, that preliminary “intuition” is a jumping-off level that may lead to extra exploration with different folks. The outcomes might be each “fun” and productive, as you’re employed collectively to take a potential artistic answer and work out how to make it work in actuality, he stated.
“I will often say, ‘Look, it is going to be really easy for you to find objections to this idea, but work with me…'” Bezos informed Fridman. “Because it’s really easy to kill new ideas in the beginning. So, you need to forewarn people and say, ‘I know it’s going to take a lot of work to get this to a fully formed idea. Let’s get started on that. It’ll be fun.'”
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