Ramit Sethi works more or less nonstop as a personal finance guru and the founder of the online personal finance and career resource "I Will Teach You to be Rich" and GrowthLab.com, where entrepreneurs go to launch and grow online businesses.
But the entrepreneur remains committed to his routine of taking off every Wednesday.
"This was a big insight that I learned it took me many years to figure out," Sethi tells CNBC.
Sethi was reading "Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got" by Jay Abraham, one of his self-professed mentors, when he came across a key insight.
"In one of the pages of this ten dollar book, there was this amazing idea which turned into a multimillion-dollar business for us," says Sethi. "And I just sat back struck by [how] if I hadn't read this book, if I hadn't taken the time, I would never known about it."
Sethi decided it was in the best interest of his business development for him to take weekly breaks.
"I decided that I wanted to carve out time to read books think about the bigger picture," he says.
Pulling away from the digital tsunami of emails, calls, text messages and Slack chats takes discipline.
"Everybody wants your time. So I started off just saying I'm going to block off an hour on Wednesdays. Then I extended it to two hours," he says. "Now, I worked my way up to having an entire Wednesday free.
"Wednesday is my strategy day. I have a list of articles to read, a list of books and I just work through them."
Not every Wednesday off leads to a multimillion-dollar idea, but not every Wednesday has to. His rate of success speaks for itself.
"Most days, nothing really comes from it," says Sethi. "I would say every quarter I get an interesting idea, and maybe once a year I get a big idea but that big idea can transform the business."
