My daily workflow

Most people lie about their daily routine. I know this because I read about waking up at half past four to take ice baths, and then I look at my own mornings. I wake up early, usually before the rest of the house, but there is no ice involved. It is just me, some coffee, and an hour of quiet before the chaos of the school run begins. I moved my family from Sweden to Marbella in 2018. We meant to stay for two years, but the quality of life caught us, and we are still here. A large part of that quality is what happens after that first cup of coffee. The early block, usually around six in the morning, is the only time my brain is completely clear. I sit down and try to tackle the hardest problem I have that day. Right now, that usually means figuring out product direction for Anchor, where we are building AI tools for alienated fathers, or mapping out infrastructure requirements for Substrat. I do the heavy lifting before anyone else is awake to interrupt me.

Then the house wakes up, and I shift abruptly from founder to father. We do the school run. It is loud, disorganised, and requires a completely different type of negotiation than anything I do at work. By the time I get back and sit down at my desk, the rest of Europe is fully online and making noise. I spend the core of my morning dealing with the immediate demands of the day. Because I am largely building and investing now rather than running a large agency, my calendar is mine to control. When Fredrik Bage and I were scaling Mediapilot back in Stockholm, my days were dictated by the office and the relentless demands of growing a company that eventually created more than 100 jobs. I had to be visible, in meetings, managing people. Today, the structure is entirely self-inflicted.

I can choose exactly what I work on every day, which means I have absolutely no one else to blame when I ruin my own schedule.

The Spanish rhythm

Living in southern Spain forces you to adopt a different pace, whether you intend to or not. Around two in the afternoon, the local energy shifts entirely. The emails slow down. The urgent messages stop arriving. I use this quiet window to play tennis. I play often, and I play quite badly, but running around a clay court trying to hit a ball is the closest I get to meditation. You cannot think about server costs or pitch decks when a ball is flying at your face. I come back, eat lunch late in the Spanish style, and prepare for the second shift of the day. This is the part of my routine I actually get right most of the time. The physical break completely resets the day, meaning I sit back down at my computer at four o'clock with the same mental clarity I had at six in the morning.

Where the system breaks down

Late afternoon is when the United States wakes up. I used to work on the commercial side at Happeo, and that muscle memory of jumping on calls across multiple time zones is hard to shake. I take video calls, review pitches for potential angel investments, and try to clear my desk for the next morning. This is also exactly where my discipline starts to fray. I have a terrible habit of saying yes to far too many requests. Someone wants to talk about a local property deal, or a young founder wants advice on commission-only sales, which is how I started out at a PR agency years ago against the advice of everyone around me. I agree to a quick chat, and that chat inevitably derails my afternoon. I still haven't learned how to guard my time effectively against my own willingness to help.

My biggest failure, though, is the evening. Since roughly 2010, I have kept a written life plan that I update every single year. I sit down and score myself out of ten on family and friends, health, finances, work, and personal time. When I do this review, the personal time score is usually the ugliest number on the page. In my early thirties, I travelled around the world for a stretch and managed to disconnect almost entirely from work. Today, I am frankly terrible at it. The phone creeps into the evening hours. I will be sitting on the sofa, theoretically watching a film and spending time with my family, while secretly checking a message or replying to an email from a developer in California. The boundaries blur in a way they never did when I had a physical office building to leave behind in Sweden.

I am 45 years old, and I will be honest with you: I still haven't got this figured out. The quiet early mornings and the midday tennis sessions work brilliantly. The late evening phone addiction and the inability to say no to afternoon meetings do not. Every year I review that life plan, I stare at my low score for personal time, and I promise myself I will finally fix it. Sometimes I actually do improve for a month or two. Other times I find myself on a call at eight o'clock at night, discussing a minor angel investment I should have politely declined weeks ago. I am getting better at recognising the mistakes, even if I haven't quite managed to stop making them.