They Run Companies, Launch Podcasts, and Ship Products — Here's How They Still Make Time for Themselves

There's a version of success we've all been sold that looks something like this: wake up at 5 a.m., grind until midnight, optimize every hour, and sleep when you're dead. Hustle culture has been so thoroughly baked into the American professional identity that taking a night off to watch a movie can feel borderline irresponsible.

But spend some time actually talking to high-achieving people — not the ones performing productivity on LinkedIn, but the ones quietly building things that last — and a different picture emerges. These are people who take their downtime seriously. Who protect their personal entertainment and rest with the same intentionality they bring to their calendars and quarterly goals.

We reached out to a cross-section of entrepreneurs, content creators, and busy professionals to find out exactly how they think about 'me time' — and what the rest of us can learn from it.

"Rest Is a Competitive Advantage"

Jamila, a 38-year-old tech founder based in Austin who recently closed a Series A round for her SaaS startup, doesn't mince words about this.

"I used to wear exhaustion like a badge of honor," she says. "I thought being tired meant I was working hard enough. Then I started noticing that my best ideas — the ones that actually moved the company forward — never came during crunch time. They came after I'd genuinely disconnected."

For Jamila, that disconnection looks like a standing Friday evening ritual she calls her "zero-input hour." No podcasts, no industry newsletters, no work-adjacent content. Just a film she's been looking forward to all week, a glass of wine, and her phone in another room.

"I had to train myself to see that as productive," she admits. "Because culturally, we're told that consuming information is always good. But your brain needs time to process, not just receive. That's where synthesis happens."

Research supports her intuition. Studies on the default mode network — the part of the brain active during rest and mind-wandering — suggest that this "offline" processing time is actually when we make novel connections between ideas. Creativity isn't just a product of hard work. It's a product of what happens between the hard work.

The Creator Who Schedules "Nothing" Like a Meeting

Marcus runs a YouTube channel with nearly 800,000 subscribers focused on personal finance and builds a newsletter on the side. His output is prolific. His schedule, he says, is also ruthlessly protective of his downtime.

"I have a recurring block on my calendar every Tuesday and Thursday from 7 to 10 p.m. that just says 'Marcus Time,'" he tells us. "It's been there for two years. My team knows not to schedule anything around it. I know not to schedule anything around it."

What happens during Marcus Time?

"Honestly, whatever I want. Sometimes I'm deep in a video game. Sometimes I'm watching three episodes of something. Sometimes I'm reading fiction, which I never do during work hours because it feels indulgent. That's kind of the point — it's supposed to feel indulgent. That's how you know it's actually rest."

Marcus is quick to push back on the idea that this is lazy or unearned. "I make better content because of those blocks. I'm more present in meetings. I don't burn out. When you're a creator, your personality and your perspective are your product. If you're depleted, the product suffers."

This is a point that comes up repeatedly in conversations with creators: the work is only as good as the person doing it, and the person is only as good as the recovery they're allowing themselves.

The Executive Who Stopped Optimizing Her Free Time

Rachel is a VP at a media company in New York City — the kind of role that comes with a full calendar, constant demands, and the expectation of availability. A few years ago, she says, she was treating her downtime the same way she treated her workday: with a plan, a goal, and a metric for success.

"I was listening to leadership podcasts on my commute, reading business books on weekends, watching documentaries that I could reference in meetings. Everything was instrumental. Everything had a purpose beyond just enjoyment."

The shift came during a vacation where, out of necessity, she ended up watching a silly reality competition show with her sister. "I laughed harder than I had in months. Not because it was profound. Because it was fun. And I realized I hadn't just had fun — unproductive, pointless, joyful fun — in a really long time."

Since then, Rachel has deliberately built what she calls "entertainment without agenda" into her week. "I watch things that have nothing to do with my industry. I read novels. I binge reality TV without apologizing for it. And I'm better at my job because of it — more emotionally regulated, more creative, more patient."

The psychological term for what Rachel was experiencing is "cognitive load" — the mental burden of constant purposeful thinking. Entertainment without an agenda is one of the few reliable ways to genuinely lower that load.

Practical Strategies Worth Stealing

Across all these conversations, a few consistent approaches emerged that anyone — regardless of how packed your schedule is — can start using immediately.

Treat your entertainment time like an appointment. Every person we spoke with had some version of this. Scheduled, recurring, and defended. Not "whenever I have time," because that time never materializes on its own.

Stop optimizing your rest. The goal of downtime isn't to become a better professional. It's to become a more whole person. That's actually what makes you a better professional, but you can't chase it directly. Let entertainment be entertainment.

Curate more, scroll less. Multiple people mentioned the energy drain of endlessly searching for something to watch. Deciding in advance — even loosely — what you're going to read, watch, or play removes a decision-fatigue tax from what's supposed to be restorative time. (This, by the way, is exactly why curated services like MeTimeBox exist — so the choosing is already done.)

Protect the transition. Getting from "work mode" to "rest mode" isn't instantaneous. Several people described building in a 15–20 minute buffer between ending work and starting their evening — a walk, a shower, a few minutes of quiet — that helped them actually arrive mentally at their downtime.

Drop the guilt. This is easier said than done, but it's the foundational shift. As Marcus puts it: "Every hour I spend genuinely resting is an investment in the next ten hours of work. Once I started seeing it that way, the guilt evaporated."

The Bigger Picture

Hustle culture isn't going away anytime soon, and the pressure to be perpetually productive is genuinely real — especially in a US professional landscape that doesn't exactly celebrate rest. But the evidence, both scientific and anecdotal, keeps pointing in the same direction: the people who sustain high performance over the long run are the ones who take their downtime as seriously as their work time.

Your 'me time' isn't a reward you earn after everything else is finished. It's a practice you maintain so that everything else is worth doing.

So block the calendar. Pick the show. Protect the evening.

You can call it self-care, you can call it strategy, or you can just call it Tuesday. Whatever gets you to actually do it.