A day in the life of a meditating CEO

Bjorn Lee, founder of MindFi / Image credit: Joshua Koo

Day in the Life is a series where personalities in the Asian tech community recount what they do on a typical day. Read more from the series here.

I am Bjorn Lee and I am the founder and CEO of MindFi, a smart meditation app for busy humans. I have had a love-hate relationship with meditation: I was forced into it when I had chest pains in India, and I loved doing it there. But I hated it when I went back to work.

I have spent the past seven years hacking my routine to build a habit.

Before MindFi, I was a product manager at both Zopim and Zendesk—the latter of which acquired the former. Prior to that, I founded an edtech startup in Silicon Valley and was a VC for three months before deciding on a life in the trenches.

Here’s a day in my life now.

8 am: Wake up, meditate, and cycle

I always snooze through two alarms before waking up and use the Apple Watch’s Breathe app because it has haptic feedback and heart rate variability tracking to gently jolt my wrist and body into motion. I am as lazy as a fish, so I immediately sit on my meditation chair for the next 10 to 20 minutes before I change my mind.

I never set a countdown; I just use a timer and stop on my own to prevent jarring shocks. I end my meditations by thanking a bunch of people and saying encouraging words to myself. Occasionally, I would jot them down in my journaling app, Day One, using the Tim Ferriss method. If I still don’t feel good, I will cycle on my elliptical for 15 minutes. Because I don’t drink coffee, that usually wakes me up.

9 to 10 am: Plan to-dos with the team or attend meetings

I do a virtual “standup” on Slack with my team and check in on our to-dos for the day. Half my team of six is overseas, so I really ensure I have ample face time with them.

This means that I only do external meetings at the start or end of my day to preserve my midday for team discussions or personal deep work. I do this also because external meetings kill my productivity due to the commute time and the switch in mental gears. This was inspired by Paul Graham’s essay “Maker Schedule, Manager Schedule.”

11 am to 1 pm: Deep work

I write my to-dos in chronological order and ensure some simple tasks are at the front. This builds up a head of steam, and I would then move on to more challenging tasks like analyzing metrics, thinking through use cases for designs, or grooming the product backlog.

I use the Pomodoro timer in my MindFi app (also called “Deep Work”) and love cranking it up to the maximum two hours. I blast my trusty EDM music on my earphones and don’t come up for air until lunch.

I usually end my two hours with a five-minute meditation, which automatically comes up on my app.

1 to 1:30 pm: Lunch

I don’t eat breakfast, so this is my first and largest meal of the day. My lunches are very quick affairs because I don’t want to break my rhythm. I also avoid lunchtime meetings because I have this notion that good food clouds the brain.

1:30 to 6 pm: Team huddles, power naps, and deep work

6 to 8 pm: End-of-day standup and meetings

8 to 12 midnight: Personal downtime

12 midnight to 1 am: Calls with advisers