If you've ever rented a designer dress for a special occasion on Rent the Runway, you have Jennifer Hyman to thank. The co-founder and CEO launched the company in 2009 and, with Harvard Business School classmate Jennifer Fleiss, has grown the company to 5 million members. Now, their incredible success inspired them to start Project Entrepreneur, an organization for women with startups offering business resources, events in multiple cities, and a pitch competition awarding a cash prize and 5-week accelerator course to three winners. Even though entrepreneurs often say they work 24/7, Hyman's nightly routine is dedicated to shutting work completely off. 

"I go to bed around 12am and wake up around 8am. The first thing I do when I get home is take off my makeup and immediately strip off my clothes. I work in fashion, I wear designer clothes, but I want to get into my Journelle pajamas right away. Then, I'm ready to watch Empire on the couch and just relax.

"I listen to a ton of music on the commute home. I'm kind of having a dance party! I have the most eclectic music taste out there. I can be listening to an indie pop song just as easily as I could be listening to a Carly Simon song from the '70s to a country song. I'm just obsessed with music, if I wasn't an entrepreneur or the founder of Rent the Runway, I swear I'd want to sing in a wedding band. 

"I'm not a list maker. What I do is I look at my calendar for the next few days and I think: what are the top three most important priorities, the meatiest challenges that I have over the next few days? I make sure that I remind myself because those are the things I need to attack when I come in first thing in the morning. Often, one's calendar can get so crowded and so busy with minutiae. If you spend your time away from work looking at emails and making sure your inbox went down to zero, that's not an effective way to spend your time as a CEO or an entrepreneur. Often times, those emails aren't that important. What is important are the hairier problems that probably take more time and more mental energy and endurance to solve. I call those critical work streams. 

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Hellin Kay
Hyman\'s Journelle pajamas.

"Nighttime is when I really get my most creative. I'm able to brainstorm new ideas, so I come to the office everyday with a fresh perspective. I think creativity for me comes from having conversations with friends and family that are not connected to Rent the Runway. I often get my best ideas for Rent the Runway when I somewhat separate from it. I derive my energy from other people. I'm a very social person and I like being in different kinds of environments. It's part of why I enjoy going out to restaurants in New York on many nights of the week. You're kind of observing new cultures in every environment, it's just fun for me to go into a new restaurant with a new vibe, new music, and a person who's wearing a different kind of outfit. It's very creatively inspiring to me. 

"I'm a magazine junkie. I have 30 different subscriptions to various magazines, and I like old-school, real magazines. I don't like reading  on iPads or online. I feel like I spend my whole day on my phone or the computer so it's actually so relaxing for me to have a copy of a magazine and bring it into bed. Part of my job is to have the vision and I find I get a lot of ideas from pop culture, which I get from magazines. I'm reading everything from ELLE to Fast Company to New York Magazine to Vanity Fair to Wired

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Hellin Kay
Hyman\'s stack of magazines at the ready.

"I have a sleep ritual. I used to be an amazing sleeper prior to Rent the Runway; post Rent the Runway, I'm an insomniac. There are only three things that can help me sleep. One is a bubble bath. I'm like 12 years old. I take a bubble bath every night. I read a fictional book that has nothing to do with business. I cannot even imagine reading a book that has anything to do with work. The book is always whatever the Gone Girl equivalent of the moment is. Lastly, I think it's really important at night to be with people that you love. Those are things to me that are critical for me being able to go to sleep. 

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Hellin Kay
Hyman\'s bubble bath essentials.

"People can't be creative on demand. It's not like I could call you into a meeting, have a brainstorming session and suddenly you have to come up with the idea that changes the company. That's not how creativity works. Often, people are inspired when they're in the most surprising of locations and also when they're relaxed. Just getting into a different zone is so important. If it was all work all the time, the level of stress would be too much and you'd become a stress-case in the office, and that's palpable to the entire team. In order to be a normal, positive person in the office, do not let issues consume you throughout the night. 

Nighttime is when I really get my most creative. I'm able to brainstorm new ideas, so I come to the office everyday with a fresh perspective.

"It used to be that I'd take an issue home with me and I'd obsess about it for the ten hours until I had to be at work again. Not only is that not going to not accomplish anything, it's actually going to make the next day worse. ... That's something I've learned as the entrepreneurial journey has continued. "