By Áine Cain
• As the CEO of Amazon and the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos is a busy person.
• However, in an interview with his younger brother Mark, the CEO said he doesn’t check his phone constantly.
• That’s because Bezos doesn’t multitask.
Jeff Bezos may be CEO of one of the biggest companies in tech, but you won’t catch him constantly checking his phone.
In a conversation with his younger brother Mark at the Los Angeles’ Summit 2017, Bezos said he prefers to stay focused on whatever he’s doing, according to Business Insider’s Zoë Bernard.
“I don’t like to multitask,” the Amazon CEO said. “It bothers me. If I’m reading my email, I want to be really reading my email.”
He might be on to something. Business Insider recently reported experts agree constant email-checking can be a drain on productivity. A 2017 survey from Deloitte found that smartphone use has been trending upwards since 2015, and plateaued this year for the first time since then. The same survey also found that nearly half of respondents are making an effort to limit time spent on their phones.
For the tech mogul, however, this isn’t some conscious effort or even a productivity strategy. Apparently, Bezos has always been this way. He talked about attending a Montessori school as a child, adding teachers would have to push his desk around the room to get him to move on to the next work station.
“I don’t need discipline in order to be not checking my email,” Bezos said. “For me it’s very natural. I love being present.”
And Bezos said if something truly important is happening, people will seek him out. Plus, he said he preferred to have face-to-face conversations with people.
“When I have dinner, I have dinner, whether it’s with friends or with my family,” he said. “I like to be talking to the people I’m with. I like to do whatever I’m doing.”
But Bezos added multitasking and phone-checking probably isn’t a bad choice for everyone. He described eating dinner with his wife MacKenzie in a restaurant and watching other couples texting and showing one another their phones.
“It seems like they’re having a very nice date so I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with that,” he said. “It’s just not how I’m wired.”
This post originally appeared at businessinsider.com.