Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

There’s a reason Steve Jobs famously always walked between meetings, during meetings. It helped him think, stay creative, to rummage, but it also forced him to take some time to just … walk. To take a break from sitting in meetings, even if it was just for a few minutes. So look at your calendar. Engineer it. Design it. Lay out the next three to six months on paper. Write down what a typical day looks like. And what a typical week or two weeks look like. Keep going for the next month. And then the next six. Now start to reengineer your day, your week, and your monthly schedule with time dedicated to feeling human. It could be ten minutes after lunch where you read an interesting Medium article or six months from now when you take a week under a palm tree. But you have to engineer your schedule to include these breaks and then hold the line when people try to schedule over them. So what will you do every few days or every week or two? Every 8–12 weeks?