Mark Zuckerberg’s daily routine: The schedule of the Meta CEO who wears the same thing every day and trains with MMA fighters

The social media session typically only lasts a few minutes but can take longer depending on current events, Zuckerberg said in a Facebook Live Q&A.

“The first thing I do is look at my phone. I look at Facebook to see what’s going on in the world,” he said in the Q&A. “It’s a pretty sad situation to be honest. I have contacts and I can’t see very well. And before I put my contacts in I often look to see what is going on Facebook.”

Zuckerberg admits checking his phone first thing in the morning is a bad habit.

“You get like a million messages of stuff that come in, and it’s usually not good. People reserve the good stuff to tell me in person,” he told Joe Rogan last year. “It’s almost like you wake up and you’re punched in the stomach, so it’s like okay … now I need to go reset myself and be able to be productive and not be stressed out about this.”

“I used to run a lot, but the problem with running is you can think a lot,” he told Rogan last year.

Instead, he started asking himself: “What’s a thing that’s both super engaging physically, but also intellectually, where you can’t afford to focus on something else? MMA is the perfect thing because if you stop paying attention for one second, you’re going to end up on the bottom.”

In June, he said on Lex Fridman’s podcast that he does three or four jiu-jitsu and MMA sessions weekly, in addition to strength and conditioning work and mobility training.

In July, Zuck said his McDonald’s order was “20 nuggets, a quarter pounder, large fries, Oreo McFlurry, apple pie, and maybe some cheeseburgers for later?”

Zuckerberg sticks with the same outfit to reduce the brainpower spent making minor decisions.

When asked about his wardrobe in 2014, he told an audience: “I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community.”

“I spend most of my time thinking about how to connect the world and serve our community better, but a lot of that time isn’t in our office or meeting with people or doing what you’d call real work,” he told CNN in 2015.

“I take a lot of time just to read and think about things by myself,” he continued. “If you count the time I’m in the office, it’s probably no more than 50-60 hours a week. But if you count all the time I’m focused on our mission, that’s basically my whole life.”

“I actually like trying to have a rule,” he told Forbes. “For every hour of meeting that I have, the team sends out the pre-reads in advance. I want to have at least an hour to read the materials and think about it. And then I want to have at least an hour to follow up with different people after the meeting.”

As for his approach to work, colleagues have likened Zuckerberg’s undivided attention to the Eye of Sauron.

Sauron, the chief antagonist in the “The Lord of the Rings” series, is shown in some films as a flaming, disembodied eye interpreted as a metaphor for evil, ever-looming over Middle-earth.

“They’re like, ‘You have this unending amount of energy to go work on something. And if you point that at any given team, you will just burn them,'” Zuckerberg told Tim Ferriss last year.

“I just think the engagement that you get of having, like, an immediate feedback loop around thinking about something and then getting to go talk to the people who are working on this is so much better than going and scheduling a meeting that you’ll have three weeks later,” he said. 

He’s tried to learn Mandarin Chinese, challenged himself in 2015 to read a new book every two weeks, and famously hit the water on an electric surfboard, meme-worthy amounts of sunscreen included.

He married his longtime girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, in 2012. Zuckerberg and Chan share three daughters, Maxima, August, and Aurelia.

“Sometimes they will read books together. Sometimes they’ll code together,” Chan said of Zuckerberg’s bedtime routine with the kids. “Mark has been doing that with August since she turned 3.”

Zuckerberg told Lex Fridman last year that he also has a “goodnight things” routine with his daughters.

“I basically go through with Max and Augie: ‘What are the things that are most important in life?'” he said. Zuckerberg points out their health, friends and family, and having something they’re looking forward to.

Chan told Forbes that her husband also sings a Jewish prayer, Mi Shebeirach, to his kids and always tucks them in, unless he has a board meeting or is traveling. She added that any work dinners he has take place after the girls go to sleep.

“I don’t stay up super late at night,” he told Forbes, adding that he aims for eight hours of sleep a night and uses an Oura ring to track his rest.

Áine Cain and Taylor Nicole Rogers contributed to an earlier version of this story.