Daniel Oberhaus via Flickr

Jeff Bezos Says the 1-Hour Rule Makes Him Smarter. New Neuroscience Says He’s Right

Jessica Stillman
4 min readOct 30, 2024

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Many CEOs, like Apple’s Tim Cook and Pepsi’s Indra Nooyi, boast about their hardcore morning routines. Not Jeff Bezos. The Amazon founder is famous for dedicating the first hours of the day to … puttering?

Bezos’s no-screen morning routine

Back in 2018, Bezos laid out his usual morning routine in a speech at the Economic Club of Washington. It includes reading the paper, drinking coffee, and having breakfast with his family. You know what his “puttering time” does not include? Looking at his phone.

In a recent interview with People, Bezos’s fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, confirmed her partner remains committed to slow mornings, adding, “We don’t get on our phones. That’s one of the rules.”

Why has Bezos banned screen time for the first hour after waking? It’s likely that his one-hour rule is partly about personal preference. We’re all wired differently when it comes to our fluctuating energy levels and tolerance for stimulation, and experts insist we do better when our routines honor our particular rhythms rather than fighting them.

But Bezos claims his puttering doesn’t just help him enjoy life more. In the same 2018 speech, he insisted his slow-burn, phone-free mornings improve his…

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