Startup founders and employees often work 75+ hours each week (if not more) to build and sell their products, develop business relationships, manage operations and strategize. The to-do list of a founder or early employee at a startup is surely never-ending.
As someone who lives this lifestyle, I’m prone to drinking numerous cups of coffee a day, exercising to offset the long hours behind my Macbook Air and engaging in several brainstorming sessions each week with my colleagues to solve product and business challenges.
This certainly becomes tricky each year during my observation of the Islamic month of fasting — Ramadan. In short, Ramadan involves 29/30 days (lunar calendar) of fasting (i.e., no water, no food, no coffee!) from dawn to dusk. These days in San Francisco, that’s 16 hours each day (~4:30 am to ~8:30 pm).
While Ramadan is both a spiritual exercise and a social, community-oriented month, in the startup lifestyle, time is undoubtedly your most valuable asset. This has forced me to “iterate” my schedule during Ramadan to figure out how to best balance my business and spiritual goals. A few years of iteration have led to my Ramadan Routine:
