Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

In the long term, you need to plan some vacations. In the short term, here’s what I recommend: 2–3 times a week—Block out parts of your schedule during your workday so you have time to think and reflect. Meditate. Read the news on some subject you don’t work on. Whatever. It can even be tangential to your work, but it should not be actual work. Give your brain a second to catch up. Learn, stay curious, don’t just react to the never-ending stream of fires to put out or meetings to attend. 4–6 times a week—Exercise. Get up. Go biking or running or weight lifting or cross-training or just take a walk. I started getting into yoga at Philips and I’ve kept it up for more than twenty-five years—it’s been hugely helpful. You have to quiet everything around you and focus to do yoga poses properly. You become conscious of your body so you instantly know if you’re off. Find something like that—where you’ll notice if you’re physically or emotionally at a breaking point and will have an opportunity to right yourself before it gets too bad. Eat well—You are an extreme athlete, but your sport is work. So fuel yourself. Don’t eat too much, don’t eat too late, cut down on refined sugars, smoking, alcohol. Just try to keep yourself from physically feeling like garbage. And if all this seems great in theory but completely impossible in practice because you can barely keep up with your emails, let alone make time to go to the gym or block out whole months of your life, then you may need to ad...