Basically, when I get home I just do emails for around three hours, which stinks. I have a thing about getting into your inbox every night before going to bed. I'm usually working from my laptop or my phone, desperately trying to get my inbox to zero before I fall asleep.
I literally have over a thousand emails in my inbox that need to be returned. I'm sure all of my friends and certain family members are like, 'Oh, look who got nominated for an Emmy and doesn't want to write me an email back!' I need a good few hours to just sit and get on the phone.
If you spend your time away from work looking at emails and making sure your inbox went down to zero, that's not an effective way to spend your time as a CEO or an entrepreneur. Often times, those emails aren't that important.
I'm up all night, and then next thing you know, it's the morning, and I'll sleep, like, three hours. I'm a night owl. I'm usually in the studio at night working, and then I get home, I'm on my phone looking at Instagram pictures and buying stuff.
There's something about TV shows and the format that becomes a bit more personal. People watch two, three in a row before they get out of bed on their laptop or when they get home from going out and before they go to sleep. People make shows part of their daily routine, and that makes them take ownership of it. If you're so arrogant as to call yourself an artist, you can't ask for anything more than that.
I try to get as close as I can to cleaning out my inbox every night.
The best time to practice mental rehearsal is at night in bed, just before you fall asleep. The last thing you do before you doze off is to imagine yourself performing at your best the following day. You will be amazed at how often the upcoming event or experience happens exactly as you imagined it.
I buy a lot of random books, and it's really hard to immediately fall asleep if I've been staring at a screen, so reading and trying to put my phone away maybe an hour before I go to sleep are two of my go-to strategies before bed.
I always map out how to get a good eight or nine hours of sleep before I even start my day. And my rule is to put my phone on silent when I go to bed; that way, no texts or emails can disturb me.
I'll tell you what's funny about it [NSA wiretapping]: They tell us we got to cut the budget; we have to have budget rollback. We're going to cut the budget on air traffic control, and every once in a while your plane is going to be delayed for three hours. But we do have the money laying around to hire people to read your emails and listen to your phone conversations. That just doesn't make any friggin' sense at all.
Stop running around, stop trying to return every email in your inbox immediately, stop cramming too much stuff into too few hours in the day. Sit down, shut up, and most importantly, be glad.
In L.A., my house is surrounded by churches, and there are no cars, so it's really nice to just walk around before I go home to check my emails from Spain, which have been coming in all night.
Before bed, I just brush my teeth and fall asleep. I don't usually wear makeup, but if I do, I'll wipe it off. Then it's pajamas and falling into bed, no other routine; I'm pretty good at just falling asleep right away.
I watch something in the gym, try to do it and may not get it. When I go home that night and my wife is talking to me and I'm not answering her, it is because I'm visualizing that thing I'm working on. I'll do that all day long. Before I go to bed I'm still thinking about it, and that happens until I can see myself doing it.
Before it was emails, it was Benghazi, and the Republicans were stirring up so much controversy about that. And I testified for 11 hours, answered their questions. They basically said yeah, didn't get her. We tried. That was all a political ploy.
That’s my credo - My work is play. I don’t complain about work. I enjoy it. I like the feeling of being able to lay down at night and you’re so doggone tired, you’re just hoping to get undressed before you fall asleep.