A Day in the Life of Sheryl Sandberg, Who Uses an Old-School Notebook, Likes ‘Bad TV’ and Goes to Bed Before 10
Sandberg is an early riser who plans her morning around dropping her two children off at school. She often arrives at work around 7 a.m., according to Fast Company.
While she may work at a tech company, Sandberg keeps track of her day with a “decidedly un-digital spiral-bound notebook,” according to Fortune‘s Miguel Helft.
The notebook is where she keeps various to-do lists. “Once every item on a page is checked, she rips the page off and moves to the next,” writes Helft.
Most of Sandberg’s day is filled up with meetings. When she joined Facebook, she brought along a new routine of “check-ins” to the company.
At the start of every leadership meeting, participants can go around the table and discuss their “emotional and professional state,” according to Bloomberg.
In a Quora post, Sandberg credited Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg with helping the entire company to conduct more efficient meetings: “We try to be clear about our goal when we sit down for a meeting — are we in the room to make a decision or to have a discussion?”
As she said in a 2015 Quora post, even when she’s surfing the web “rather than finishing up my work for the night,” she’s still taking note of how people use social media in general.
The Facebook COO revealed that her work has been a comfort since the sudden death of her husband Dave Goldberg in 2015: “Facebook is helping me get through what has been the hardest year of my life.”
No matter how busy the Facebook COO is, she still makes certain to leave work by 5:30 p.m. sharp.
Before her husband’s death, the family would eat dinner together every evening and “share the best and worst moments of our day,” she wrote in the New York Times. It’s a tradition that Sandberg continues today with her children.
After work, Sandberg finds the time to dive into some good books. The published author has been a voracious reader since childhood.
“After I finish a book, I’ll often look to see how many page corners are turned down as one gauge of how much I liked it,” she told the New York Times.
She also unwinds by catching a few episodes of “bad TV.”
Sandberg admits that she didn’t get enough sleep earlier in her career, according to the blog Fatigue Science. Nowadays, she has adopted the habit of turning off her phone before bed.
Today, Sandberg tends to turn in early. She even supported Arianna Huffington’s sleep hygiene campaign, calling for business leaders to encourage their employees to get more shut-eye.
In a 2015 Quora post, she wrote that she was speaking on the phone one evening with Zuckerberg, and told him she would be going to bed at 9:30 p.m. He became worried that she was feeling sick. “I explained that with two young children, 9:30 p.m. was often my normal bed time,” Sandberg wrote.