The first thing Cook does in the morning is check his iPhone, on which “he reads email, reviews overnight sales reports and studies countries where numbers are changing to keep his finger on the pulse of the business,” The Wall Street Journal reported in 2024.
“I spend my first hour doing email, and I’m pretty religious about doing this,” he said on Dua Lipa’s podcast. “I read emails from a lot of customers and employees, and the customers are telling me things that they love about us or things that they want changed about us. Employees are giving me ideas. But it’s a way to stay grounded in terms of what the community is feeling, and I love it.”
Cook said on the “Table Manners” podcast that he gets “probably 500, 600” emails per day, although that number can be far higher on “days where there’s something extraordinary going on.”
“I get notes both that are positive and some that are not so positive because people feel free to reach out and voice their opinion and I think this is great because it keeps my hand on the pulse of the company,” Cook told WSJ in 2024. “I try to internalize it and ask myself, well is that accurate or not, and not just quickly put up a defensive shield and say, ‘Why? What we’ve done is right.'”
Employees, too, have experienced Cook’s early morning emails.
“Tim wakes up really early and is very well capable of expecting you to reply back before the sun comes up,” one source told Business Insider in 2014.
