Wall Street’s hacks and habits to stay on top of their game

Nina Gnedin, a San Francisco-based portfolio manager from Man Group, starts her day at 4:30 a.m. because she works East Coast market hours.

“I wake up. I do my face. I do my skincare. I brush my teeth. I drink my double shot of espresso. I do all my morning work rituals, where I check the trades. I check on the portfolios around 7, 7:30. I get coffee again.”

Her “very regimented” workday ends at 3 p.m., which allows her to get outside and enjoy the outdoors. “There’s no day of the year where the sun’s down when I’m done with work,” she said.

Productivity hacks and habits

Bridgewater Associates deputy chief investment officer Blake Cecil likes to push himself (and his team) to meet deadlines that might be arbitrary on paper but give him a mental goal to chase.

The 32-year-old overpromises on projects intentionally to ” trick” himself into working more efficiently and diligently. One example is he will ask his team and himself this hypothetical: “Let’s imagine we had to deliver this in 24 hours — how would we do that?”

Often, this leads to creative and innovative work, he told BI.

BlackRock’s Chi Chen, 34, winds down her weekends with a Sunday evening reading ritual that helps her “distill my brain.”

It’s a two-hour affair, starting with one hour of the books she’s reading. The fixed-income portfolio manager is a fan of non-fiction and just read “Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst” by Robert Sapolsky. After that, she turns back to the markets. She reads external and internal research and prepares for the week.

Commuting with a purpose

Since starting at Bank of America, Justin Elliott has had a daily regimen designed to take up his 20-minute commute to work.

“It’s really around my faith — I do a devotion. Read a Bible scripture, pray. Come into the office and listen to a gospel song,” the 29-year-old vice president on the institutional rates sales desk at Bank of America told BI. “That’s my every morning routine for getting me centered for the day. It’s about reminding me why I’m here and what it’s all about.”

He also goes to the gym two to three times a week and has recently been doing sound baths and meditation with his wife.

Listening to music on her drive to her Boston office helps Fidelity Investments’ Palmer Osteen, 31, take her mind off what’s about to come and what’s ahead so she can start her workday with a clear head. It also works for her way home.

Also, on the ocean theme, Moelis’ Kolwicz is a pretty avid surfer.

“Being out on the ocean, getting that physical activity — it’s easy to zone out.”

There are ways to decompress and relax on land, too. Melissa Ding, an infrastructure investor at BlackRock, likes to engage in meditative activities like cooking, pottery, or tending to her terrace garden to give the 33-year-old a “little bit of mental reset.”

“When I need a little bit of rest time, there are just things that I do that where I can kind of zone out.”

Her garden consists of flowers, including dahlias, and a recently planted fig tree.

Wells Fargo’s Annie Cheslin, 34, recently learned how to play the centuries-old strategy game mahjong, which she’s become “obsessed with.” The managing director in high-grade municipal trading joined a club that meets twice a month to play.

Exercise routines

Physical challenges are a way to distract yourself from the day-to-day and counterbalance the time you spend in front of computer screens or client dinners.

Margaret Williams, a 31-year-old executive director at Morgan Stanley, said she exercises in some form or fashion every day. Williams will do anything, from a run in Central Park to weightlifting to laps at a hotel pool on the road to late-night walks with the dog.

“It’s a part of staying balanced, physically and mentally,” she said.

Being disciplined about daily workouts is also how Apollo’s Austin Anton, 32, clears his head.

“I find that when I go for a run, I have my most creative ideas, and I love to run, and I tend to do that every other day,” he said. “So I find that very helpful in terms of clearing my head and allowing me to think through something.”

“I definitely think getting sleep is important,” Elizabeth Stone Redding, a principal at TPG, told BI. “It’s certainly something I have realized as I’ve matured in my career, that you really need to use your brain, and you need to get a decent amount of sleep for that.”

The 33-year-old also habitually sets priorities to stay on track and not get overwhelmed.

“It’s very easy to obviously be overwhelmed with a large list of things, but narrowing it down and saying, ‘Okay, these are the two or three things I really want to do today,’ helps me a lot,” Stone Redding said. “I try to have — even if it’s just in my head — a list of two or three things I want to accomplish in a given day.”

Taking a step back

Matt Gilbert, a 35-year-old managing director at Thoma Bravo, started working with an executive coach a few years ago. He was surprised when the coach pushed him to pull back at work.

“I would say, in general, workaholic or ‘Type A’ people tend to try to grasp more and more responsibility,” he said. “And I actually think ultimately that was the case for me.”

Gilbert now spends more time with his family. He has made a habit of watching TV with his wife every night and dropping his oldest daughter at school.

“I think I fill up my cup in terms of personal fulfillment so that my time that I’m at work, I can really, really focus and dedicate to that and kind of maximize the time that I have here.”

Gidan Dan’s key ritual at work is consistently staying in touch with his clients, but at home, the Citadel Securities senior vice president takes the chance to relax.

“A lot of my colleagues are really good runners and they work out and everything. I’m completely different,” he said. “I think I work long enough hours, so I don’t want to exhaust myself too much. So I would just go home, and taking care of my kids is enjoyable but exhausting stuff,” Dan said of his two daughters, aged 1 and 4.

Feroz Khosla, a managing director at Goldman Sachs, isn’t just looking for work-life balance, but “work-life harmony — which just means, when you look back at your career, you feel as if there was harmony between work and life,” he told BI.

“Sometimes, you do need to have the power to say no, but do it gracefully,” he said. “Maybe the answer is sure, but not right now—and being able to do that without disappointing people is super helpful.”