Julie Chapon, the 39-year-old CEO and cofounder of Yuka, runs her day with a simple rule: protect focus.
Chapon says she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children, wakes up at 6:30 a.m., and spends the early morning getting her kids ready before cycling about 15 minutes to an office close to her apartment. She arrives between 7:30 and 8 a.m., grabs coffee, and writes down her thoughts.
Yuka, the app that rates food and cosmetics based on ingredients and campaigns for bans and reformulations, grew quickly after Chapon started it in France around 10 years ago. As the company expanded, she says she learned to say no, very politely, to 80% of the emails she receives.
That discipline extends to her calendar. Chapon says her afternoons are usually free of meetings unless she has no choice. She prefers to decide what to work on based on the moment, rather than locking every hour in advance.
Her lunch routine is just as deliberate. At the office, she goes to the gym at noon and has lunch at 1 p.m. She says she does not want a boring lunch, and once or twice a week she and two other people on the US team take a two-hour lunch. Sometimes that means one hour at the gym and one hour over lunch.
Chapon also described the culture shock of moving to New York three years ago, when Yuka started growing in the US. With her French cofounders, she expected long lunches to be normal. Instead, she found that many people in the US do not take lunch at all, or eat at their desks. In France, she said, people gather around a table at 1 p.m. and can stay for one or two hours.
She keeps the same boundary at the end of the day. Chapon says she tries to leave the office around 5:30 p.m. so she can spend two hours with her children before bedtime.
The playbook here is not about working less for the sake of it. It is about refusing to let the administrative noise of growth consume the founder's job. If you are spending your day answering everyone else, you are not building the roadmap you are supposed to own.
Founders who get this right move faster. Chapon's routine is a reminder that attention is a scarce asset, and once it is gone, margins, momentum, and decision quality all suffer.
