Andrew Bailey among finance leaders to leave session in Bangkok when Russian finance minister addressed group

The Bank of England governor, Andrew Bailey, has taken part in a walkout of finance leaders who left an International Monetary Fund meeting in protest against Russian involvement.

Bailey joined counterparts from France, Germany and a number of Scandinavian and Baltic countries who left the session in Bangkok when the Russian finance minister, Anton Siluanov, addressed the group in Russian.

• Hardik Jagda wants to function like an Olympian, and waking up at 3 a.m. helps him do that.
• He commits long hours to his AI-based company, but says he doesn't enforce 996 hours on his team.
• For Jagda, 996 misses the point. Here's how he structures his day instead.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Hardik Jagda, 35, the CEO of Proximity Works, who lives in San Francisco. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

In 2017, I wanted to build my own company, but I couldn't jump into it full-time because of my financial obligations at home.

Instead, I'd spend the mornings and evenings outside my full-time job working on my side projects. That time was foundational for building my company, Proxmity Works, which I launched in 2019. My aim was to help broadcasters scale their live sports streaming platforms worldwide. In 2020, we started building AI infrastructure for live sports.

Those years made me aware of how my body clock works. I read a lot of autobiographies from entrepreneurs and athletes to understand what allowed them to build what they achieved. I noticed athletes would talk about starting their day early to train and work, in time for rest and recovery throughout the day. I started modeling my days after this, waking up early so I could have four to five hours to build my company before work started. I still stick to this lifestyle now that I'm a full-time founder and CEO.

I want to structure my day to function like an Olympian

In the early stages of Proximity, I performed pretty much every role in the company. Today, I have a team of roughly 45 people, five in the US and the rest spread out globally. My cofounder is based in India.

After 7 a.m., my time isn't mine anymore because I have requests coming in from employees in different time zones.

I like to start the day early, so I'm protecting the first three hours as time for myself. I usually wake up between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. Between 3 and 6 a.m., I don't touch my emails or look at messages.

I use these early hours to focus on strategic decisions. There was one point, roughly two years ago, when we had to interview a lot of engineers quickly for a new project. I sat down with my talent acquisition team and found a way to redesign our recruitment workflow to take place within 72 hours. That wouldn't have been possible if I didn't give myself the three-hour morning block.

In the mornings, I work out and write my goals down. These are usually measurable and trackable goals for my company, as well as goals for myself and my fitness.

Most of my team calls don't start before 7:30 or 8 a.m. I usually take my first couple of meetings at home before driving to the office. During the day, I try to minimize Zoom calls and take meetings as audio calls so I can move around during them. I try to wrap up my meetings by 2:30 p.m., work out at 3 p.m., and then focus on more creative tasks, like speech-writing, after that. I spend my evenings with loved ones before going to bed around 9 p.m. and trying to get seven hours of sleep.

It's not like I start my day at 4 a.m. and just work through the next 12 hours. I build in slots for "recovery" throughout the day. On my calendar, I put in 15-minute slots before important meetings, where I remind myself of my goal for the call.

For the most part, I work six days a week, spending my Saturdays focusing on a key skill I want to develop, like public speaking.

'996' misses the point. I don't run my team with this schedule in mind.

For the most part, I work six days a week.

I work more than 40 hours a week, but I don't keep track of the time. I listen to my body.

We don't keep track of how many hours the team works. It's more about a culture of ownership, where people really care about the problem they're working on.

Even though I've become a morning person, we're fine with engineers who are more productive at night, as long as they maintain a five-to-six-hour overlap with the other engineers.

"996 culture," working six days a week from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., has gained traction in Silicon Valley. I think it misses the point. It's more about volume than it is about structure. You want to structure your day towards putting in your best work by thinking about when you'll spend time training, recovering, and learning new skills. I'd rather focus on the right structures than on volume.

Do you have a story to share about working in a 996 culture? Contact this reporter at ccheong@businessinsider.com

Excavations in Germany’s Ruhr region have uncovered evidence of a substantial underground mining operation that predates the area’s industrial expansion. The discovery is providing new clues to the origins of European coal mining.

Archaeologists have identified a previously unknown coal-mining tunnel stretching at least 130 metres beneath woodland near Sprockhövel in western Germany. The remains provide evidence of coordinated underground construction at a time when the Ruhr’s mining industry was still developing, long before the region became synonymous with heavy industry.

The discovery was announced on 15 October by the Westphalia-Lippe Regional Association (LWL), whose archaeologists are working alongside the German Mining Museum in Bochum and GeoPark Ruhrgebiet. The team says its findings shed light on tunnelling techniques used before the eighteenth century, although the newly identified passage has not yet been given a precise scientific date.

At Haßlinghausen, a forest floor conceals old shafts, spoil heaps and depressions left by abandoned mining operations. Researchers did not enter an intact underground gallery. Instead, they identified the location of a collapsed passage by excavating at two former shaft sites and drilling into the surrounding spoil. Subsidence created by the collapse left a recognisable trace above ground.

How Early Miners Organised Underground Work

The evidence suggests a more complex operation than miners simply following exposed seams into the earth. Construction shafts were sunk at intervals along the proposed tunnel. Workers descended through them and excavated separate stretches underground, later joining those sections into a continuous passage.

This method allowed several groups to work simultaneously rather than advancing from a single entrance. It also demanded planning and considerable labour. The filled-in shafts and disturbed soil are still visible in the excavated sections, enabling specialists to reconstruct the miners’ methods even though much of the original tunnel has collapsed.

Till Kasielke of GeoPark Ruhrgebiet explained that the construction shafts were located beside the underground route and then filled after the gallery was completed. Jennifer Garner, an archaeologist at the German Mining Museum, said the excavations would provide material for scientific dating and a better understanding of the effort required to build the structures.

The latest work follows a 2025 investigation of a separate, approximately 70-metre tunnel nearby. That earlier feature reached a coal seam some ten metres below ground. Researchers suspected it might predate the seventeenth century because it appeared to have been overlooked during later mining activity. The newly identified 130-metre passage is a distinct discovery.

The chronology matters because horizontal tunnels changed the possibilities of coal extraction. Early miners could reach seams by digging pits or inclined shafts, but groundwater increasingly obstructed work at depth. Drainage galleries allowed water to escape, making deeper workings more practical and potentially extending the life of individual mining sites.

An Industrial Region’s Earlier History

The Ruhr is usually associated with the vast collieries, factories and transport infrastructure that drove Germany’s expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet coal was extracted locally during the Middle Ages. The transition from small workings to organised subterranean networks remains poorly documented, partly because written records from the earliest periods are scarce.

The archaeological research programme, which began with related investigations in 2024, is intended to address that gap. The team has excavated soil layers associated with old shafts, and the recovered material may help establish when specific construction techniques were introduced. For now, it would be premature to assign the new passage a medieval date.

At Essen, the UNESCO-listed Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex preserves the architecture and machinery of the Ruhr’s later industrial era. The remains at Sprockhövel represent a different historical record: temporary shafts, collapsed passages and waste deposits left by miners whose operations preceded industrial-scale coal production.

Across Europe, such landscapes have become an important part of cultural heritage. EU Today has previously reported on the preservation of Belgium’s Bois du Cazier colliery, where 262 people died in the 1956 mining disaster. In Sprockhövel, the focus is on a much earlier workforce, whose organisation and technical knowledge must be reconstructed from the ground itself.

Further dating and analysis will determine whether the newly identified tunnel pushes back the known chronology of organised drainage and gallery construction in the Ruhr. The excavations have already established that a substantial underground project once operated beneath a forest whose surface retains remarkably little indication of the work carried out there.

Image credit: LWL-Archäologie für Westfalen / Manuel Zeiler