DREW BARRYMORE IS FIGURING IT OUT

The actress and entrepreneur runs a successful lifestyle brand and a production company, and she launched a daily talk show in the middle of a pandemic. What are her tricks to making it all work? She’ll get back to you.

- STEPHANIE SCHOMER

HABITS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE

There’s always more work to do, and never more time to do it. We asked some of the busiest entrepreneurs we could find how they manage to make it all happen. The answer? There’s no one-size-fits-all formula— you must create systems that work for you.

Drew Barrymore isn’t sure she belongs in this magazine.

“Entrepreneur is a word I aspire to, but it’s not how I feel,” she says. “It sounds like someone who’s got their shit together. If this magazine was called Human Foibles, I’d be perfect. Which is to say: If anyone else out there is struggling to get it all done, I relate.”

But she also can offer a simple coping mechanism, a habit she formed recently that’s helped keep her focused through a year of reinvention. Instead of obsessing over what she hasn’t gotten to, she lists out everything she has accomplished. “We don’t often take inventory of what we’ve done—it’s very much a to-do-list kind of world,” she says. “But once in a while, make an ‘I’ve done this’ list.”

The exercise has given her moments of feeling a little less frantic and a little less desperate—however fleeting those moments may be. Barrymore juggles the intersecting worlds of entertainment and lifestyle products, and the events of 2020 have left her teams to grow a consumer-products brand at a time when shoppers aren’t shopping, and manage a daily talk show that can’t have a live audience.