Y Combinator president Sam Altman shares his morning ritual

Sam Altman, the president of prominent Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator, is a busy guy.

“Very time-poor these days,” he wrote today in an ask-me-anything session with the Hackathon Hackers public Facebook group, in response to a question about whether he played the game StarCraft II.

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It turns out that Altman — an investor in Instacart, OpenDoor, Optimizely, and Reddit, among others — has a very specific way of using his time on weekdays. Someone asked him if he had a morning ritual, and he was quick to spill the beans. Here’s what he had to say:

I get up late, have an espresso, and immediately start work. I try to get roughly caught up on email before I leave the house, then if I need to write anything or review a complex deal I do that, and then I head to the office and work on my top few priorities for the day. I try to schedule my meetings in the afternoon.

That level of clarity is inspiring. For anyone looking for advice on how to allocate time, Altman’s recent blog post “The days are long but the decades are short” is also worth a read.

And for those keen to find out what Altman likes to spend time on, look no further than his answer to a question in today’s AMA about his views on strong artificial intelligence.

“I spend a lot of time on this — I think it will happen, and I think it will be the most important event in human history,” he wrote.