Hisham El Nazer, Google Egypt country director and director of MENA startups and geo-expansion: Each week, My Morning Routine looks at how a successful member of the community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of random business questions just for fun. Speaking to us this week is Hisham El Nazer, Google Egypt country director and director of MENA startups and geo-expansion (LinkedIn). Edited excerpts from our conversation:

I like to introduce myself personally first, before professionally. I’m married with three children, aged 11, nine, and almost two — the youngest keeps us on our toes. I’m a US-Egyptian who was born and raised in New York for the first half of my life. My passion in life is traveling. Keeping fit and music are also a very big part of my life.

From a professional standpoint, I’m currently the country director for Google in Egypt. I also manage startups for Google across the Middle East and Africa. I’ve been working for about 25 years now, including five years with Google. Prior to that, I started my career in consumer goods, working for P&G, the Gillette Company, and Mars. I was based in Dubai for a number of years, and spent a year in London and Turkey as well.

I would say my role is divided into three parts. The first part is really the heart of what we’re doing as Google, which is helping develop Egypt as a whole — helping everyday people in their everyday lives, and looking at how to maximize the number of people that are online and using the internet and using our products that can be helpful to them. We help businesses in Egypt by helping people get jobs and helping businesses get more servers. And we help the economy overall in creating value.

I also run a sales operation. That would be the second piece. And then the third bit would be developing people in my team, growing their careers and building their capabilities, and seeing them succeed. Their growth really is a success for everyone.

I’m a very structured person. The very first thing I do when I get up is work out. I do that five days a week, religiously because it helps me maintain my focus through the day. Then I shower, have breakfast, and I watch the newsbeat on broadcast TV or online, just to know what’s going on. Enterprise is literally the very first thing that I look at; I find it very informative, and I love how it’s formatted to allow me to read headlines before diving into areas that I’m more interested in. And then I prepare for my day through a quick review of my to-do list and my meeting lineup. I always prepare my plan for the day the evening before.

My workdays are usually jam-packed, often with meetings with my team, customers, people from other functions across Google regionally or globally. I also meet with many government officials — that’s a big part of my role. I try to cap meetings at 30 minutes each.

Then I like to carve out focus time for myself. It’s very hard to do that, but it’s actually time where I can do a bit more thinking, planning, course correcting and actually getting desk work done.

The one constant in my day is planning and structure. I never stop planning and scheduling things to do and people to meet. I eat almost at the exact same time every day: My main meal of the day is at 12:30-1pm. I have two cups of coffee a day, one in the morning, one after lunch and that’s it. I also prioritize my sleep — I need to get at least 6.5-7 hours to be at my best and avoid being cranky or losing focus. I’ve always been organized and structured and it’s an important trait for me to juggle my work and life outside of it.

I’m a very big believer in work-life balance, and I do walk the walk. I like to be a role model for others on my team by working hard and playing hard. In my case, playing means making time for my family, including spending time with my kids every day after school, and staying connected to friends and family by phone. I believe you work to live, you don’t live to work.

I make it a point to take vacations. Those are the times that you'll remember most in your life, and I try to do that at least twice a year.

When everybody goes to bed, I have my me-time where I wind down — I love watching a little bit of TV. I don’t get that much time for it, but I try to carve out 30-45 minutes at the end of the day where I can try and take my mind off of everything.

I recently watched a couple of shows that I thought were fantastic: WeCrashed, which is the story of WeWork, and Super Pumped — the story of Uber. I’m in the tech industry, so this is probably why they pertain to me.

A lot of people have read it, but I only recently read Sapiens. I really recommend it to anyone who hasn’t read it yet; I think reading is very important in continuing to learn.

One thing I learned is that there are no shortcuts. Everybody wants to grow their careers and be as successful as they can be as quickly as possible, but I learned that patience is very important. It takes consistent hard work. It’s not about the short term gains. It’s a marathon and you have to put in that time, hard work and effort and look at the trajectory.