Melinda French Gates says the discipline that carried her through early motherhood was small enough to fit into almost any day, ten minutes set aside for herself, phone put away, before the demands of parenting and work took over. She has described the habit in recent interviews as something she stumbled into rather than planned, and one she now recommends to anyone going through a difficult stretch.
French Gates founded Pivotal Ventures after her 2021 divorce from Bill Gates ended a 27 year marriage, and she has spent the years since writing and speaking about how people, especially women, navigate major transitions. Her 2025 book, The Next Day, gathers those lessons, drawing on her own experience alongside interviews with other people who rebuilt their lives after a loss, a divorce, or a career change.
Speaking at an event in London in October, French Gates said the instinct to fill every free moment with the next obligation works against the kind of reflection a real transition requires. Her advice was to slow down on purpose, take time in quiet, she said, rather than moving straight from one demand to the next.
That framing extends to what she has said about raising her three children, including her daughter Phoebe Gates, who has built a public profile of her own in recent years. French Gates has said that protecting a small amount of time for herself, whether through meditation or a jog, made her a more patient and present parent rather than taking time away from her family.
Her broader message lands amid a wider shift in how workers describe what they want from a job. Surveys of job seekers over the past year have repeatedly found that work life balance now outranks salary as the top priority for many candidates, a reversal from the years before the pandemic. French Gates has framed her own habit less as a productivity trick and more as a rejection of the perfectionism she says makes transitions harder than they need to be.