The Designed Day: Joao Rios on Why Most People Are Solving the Wrong Problem

Joao Rios works five and a half hours a day. He wakes at six, rides a bike, spends time with his daughter and his wife, has coffee with his ninety-one-year-old grandmother, reads a book, and only then starts working. He is a Brazilian advisor to CEOs and founders who has built more than forty businesses across six countries.

In this interview he describes the structure he built, and why he believes most people are solving the wrong problem.

1) You say you work five and a half hours a day. There is an entire market of founders who take pride in working fourteen. One of the two sides is wrong.

That is an average. Some days I work less, some days a little more.

What I can tell you is that if you work fourteen, sixteen, eighteen hours a day, I am sorry, but I am absolutely certain that at least thirty or forty percent of that, and probably much more, is anaesthesia. It is the habit of doing what should not be done by you, or what nobody should be doing at all. It is more waste of time than execution.

It is being in motion without moving. Like running a marathon on a treadmill.

And there is the other side, which to me is by far the most important and the most dangerous. A CEO who spends eighty percent of his time on what should not be him arrives at the twenty percent that matters already tired, already spent, with nothing left of himself.

It is a disguised absence, because he is not there. It is only the body. So after work, what is left of him for everything else is only what is left of him.

2) Let's get concrete. Describe the day for me, from the moment you wake up to the moment you sleep.

Six in the morning, I wake up and get on the bike. While I pedal, I handle the one-off investment and payment matters. That runs until seven, or until my daughter wakes up, whichever comes first (laughs).

Seven o'clock, time with my daughter and my wife. Seven thirty, coffee with my grandmother, who is ninety-one and lives next door. That is a sacred block.

Eight o'clock, Bible reading and a book. Eight thirty, overview of the day.

Nine o'clock the main block starts, and it runs to eleven thirty. That is the protected peak. At eleven twenty I open a ten-minute window for WhatsApp and email, inside the block. Eleven thirty, decompression.

Noon, lunch, and then I take my daughter to school. I rest a little after that.

Two in the afternoon, execution: calls, the operational work, whatever orbits. Late afternoon there is training, and on the days when I am the one picking my daughter up, execution ends earlier so it fits.

Six in the evening, dinner and family. In the evening there are the commitments of faith, which are fixed in the week and do not move.

Nine thirty at night, review of the day, fifteen minutes. That is when I close the scoreboard of what happened, record sleep, focus and training, and lay out the following day. Ten o'clock, sleep.

3) That is two working blocks separated by a two-hour hole in the middle of the day. Is that design, or is it what was left over?

Two. The morning is where my cognitive peak is, and that is why it is the best block, not preference. That is where the work that demands the head goes: strategy, creation, decision. The afternoon is a good block, and that is where execution goes.

And this is individual. There are people whose peak is at night. The mistake is not waking up late, it is putting the hardest thing of the day outside your own peak and then concluding you are incapable.

And the day has six things that need to happen, never more than six. Two of them are the ones that pull everything: one from the business and one personal. The other four orbit, and those get a time ceiling, not a target.

And each one needs a finish line written before it starts. "Make progress on the project" has no end, so it runs until you are tired. "Choose three suppliers and message them" has one. Something without a finish line is the number one cause of a day that does not close.

A distinction that looks like a detail and is not: these are tasks, not appointments. Going to the meeting does not count. Taking my daughter to school does not count. That is the calendar. What counts is preparing the meeting, writing the notes, unblocking what was stuck. An appointment already has a time. A task is what has to be produced, and it is the task that disappears when the day gets tight.

Beyond that, what is not in the calendar does not exist. If the calendar is already full, saying no is easy.

4) This is a regime. Someone is going to say it is too rigid, or that it is easy for a man who has already made it and has no boss.

I did not have a calendar either. I never got along with any of it. The difference is that I had two options: carry on the way I was, or find out how I work and design around that.

And I am not saying you have to be crazy, because I am the crazy one. I monitor and schedule minute by minute what I should be doing. I have an alarm for every transition. That is not a figure of speech.

You do not need to be crazy. You only need to know your own limits.

It is not for everyone to keep an insane colour-coded calendar like mine. Everyone builds their own mechanism. You do not have to use the same tools I do.

So the one certainty I want to leave is this: it makes no sense at all to start your day without knowing what on earth you are going to do. And it does not matter whether you are going to spend the whole morning making muffins with your daughter or whether you have a business meeting. What matters is knowing that I was supposed to start at nine and finish at nine thirty. Why did I not do that?

5) Someone reads this and decides to start tomorrow. Where?

Do not start in full mode. If you have never done any of this, never had a calendar in your life, and you want to go straight to full Jedi mode, the odds are high that you will get frustrated and never get anywhere.

So go slowly. And this is my life phrase: no rush, but no wasted time. One step at a time. If you do not start with ten minutes, you will never reach ten hours.

And if you have to pick one single thing to do tomorrow, it is this: write the finish line before you start any task. That is all. If you cannot say what finishing means, there is no way to know whether you finished. You just stop.

After that, you need to find out what you are doing today with the time you claim not to have. And there is no guessing there, there is measurement.

6) Last one. A sentence for whoever is reading this at eleven at night, still working.

Every yes and every no in life has to pass through the filter of what matters most. Until you define what matters most, everything matters most, and whoever shouts loudest becomes your priority.

There is nothing more freeing than knowing what you are going to do tomorrow. And being certain that it is a real part of the objectives that make up the life you want to live.

That is what having real success means.

Joao Rios is a Brazilian entrepreneur and advisor to CEOs and founders. Over twenty-five years he has started or run more than forty businesses across six countries, one of which reached 6,147 employees, and founded an e-commerce company still operating since 2012. For more than eight years he has advised over 1,100 founders and executives, from early-stage founders to executives at Fortune 500 companies, privately, by referral, under confidentiality. More at joaorios.com.