Sam corcos

Sam Corcos is the Co-Founder and CEO at Levels, the leading metabolic fitness company that uses wearables to help quantify the effect of diet on metabolic health. Levels tracks your blood glucose in real-time, so you can maximize your diet and exercise.

On his morning routine.

I’m not naturally a morning person, but I do prefer to be up before 7.

I’m much more productive on days when I wake up early. 

I’ve tried different types of fasting and a number of diets over the years, but what’s worked best for me is replacing coffee with tea.

My favorite tea right now is Taiwanese milky oolong, which gives me a nice and steady caffeine drip rather than an explosive caffeine spike from coffee.

I do much better mentally when I have a large breakfast that’s high in fat, which generally includes a quarter stick of butter, four eggs, and a whole avocado. The high fat content definitely improves my mental sharpness throughout the day.

On upgrading his productivity

A big mistake I made early on in my career was mixing a manager and maker schedule. I would code, take a meeting, code, take a phone call, code, and so on.

It was emotionally draining in a way that I didn’t even recognize.

When you’re on a maker schedule, context switching is painful.

The biggest improvement came when I started designating days as either maker or manager days. I’d block off the whole day for either 100% emails, meetings, calls or 100% coding and other deep work activities.

Right now, I have Monday, Wednesday, and Friday as manager days. Tuesday, Thursday, and weekends as maker days.

It’s been a game changer for my personal productivity.

On protecting his time.

I block off my calendar well in advance and I’m very defensive of it. 

Regarding longer blocks of time, I do a “think week” once a quarter, with no phone and limited email.

Of course there’s a lot of anxiety that comes with being offline and away from your company for a whole week. But, if you have the right people in place, good documentation, and a good process, your presence should be largely redundant. 

Using my calendar effectively has massively reduced my anxiety.

When designing your day to day life, you should really be focused on the one thing that’s a finite resource: your time.

Then build your schedule around that and optimize that time for high leverage activities. I spend about 4 hours every day processing email.

I also despise texting because it can’t be triaged. I respond to 100% of emails — though it might be a few days late — but I still haven’t figured out a system to make sure I close the loop on text messages. Naturally, I’m an avid user of Superhuman, which I highly recommend to anyone who processes a lot of email.

Email is where I process most of my life.

On his competitive streak.

I’m pathologically competitive.

It’s always been that way. Unless there’s a competition at the end of it, I won’t do it. Whether that’s in sports or in business. I played rugby, football, and track in college which definitely fueled that streak as well.

I’m also quite competitive with myself, even with the basics of keeping in shape.

In a pre-COVID world, I’d hit about 10 miles per day of walking and do my best to constantly stay active.

On the impact of reading.

I absolutely love reading; I’ve been reading 2 books a week since 2013.

Probably the most consequential and positive decision I’ve made in my life was back in 2013 when I decided to take a break from news and social media for a month, and replace that newly found time with reading.

I managed to read almost 10 books that month, which was more books than I had read in the previous several years. 

Within a couple of weeks, my anxiety and stress levels noticeably dropped.

I recognized, only in retrospect, how much better I felt physically as well. I decided to run the experiment after reading Ryan Holidays’ book, “Trust Me, I’m Lying”, which convinced me that I needed to improve my information diet.

I haven’t consumed any form of news, be it written, verbal, spoken, or otherwise since 2013. One of the other improvements was when I discovered audiobooks. I’ve been listening to audiobooks for so long that my default listening speed is 3.5X, which I’m able to do with full retention.

It’s taken years to incrementally get there.

I’ll often pop in an audiobook and go for an hour-long walk to decompress and take a break from work and email.

On his evening routine.

In a pre-COVID world, I’d attend some social gathering with a small group of people, probably 6 days per week. These days, it’s mostly catching up on email. I’ve been able to hit inbox 0 probably 2 or 3 times a week during quarantine.

I also used to host weekly salon dinners with 8 to 10 of my intellectual friends. We’d cover a range of topics: anything from epistemology and ontology, to more experiential ideas like human connection and friendship. We haven’t been able to do these for a while, but I’m looking forward to getting it up and running again.

I’m not great at the wind-down bit, I’ll be honest.

Of course I’ve read a ton of books emphasizing the importance of sleep hygiene before bed and its effect on sleep quality, but for me, I’m usually at the computer until I fall asleep. Matteo’s going to lecture me when he reads this!

My sleep hygiene is admittedly terrible, but I do consistently get at least 8 hours of sleep a night. A few things that have improved the quality of my sleep are silicone earplugs and an eye mask.

Most nights I’ll do my best to be in bed around 10.