Yang Ding-yi: As long as one stays positive and has little rituals of gratitude, time is relative

Yang Ding-yi sleeps just two to four hours per night, but the Taipei TV celebrity and head of a health empire could hardly be in better shape.

After staying up late to work on medical science papers, the 54-year-old usually rises later for two hours of body-building exercise, a topic of his dozens of television appearances. He also starts the day with at least five minutes of saying private thanks to people and to parts of his body for their years of hard work.

These daily habits help Yang lead companies and academic institutions spanning 35,000 employees and thousands more students, from Taiwan and the United States. The customs are part of a broader approach to life that Yang describes as "getting rid of garbage", or retreating from modern pressure to process multiple concepts every second.

That approach fits into a deeper context of alternative health care long popular in Asia.

"Look at the ancient people, they would be lucky if during the course of one hour there should be two or three concepts to be discussed, and here we're talking about two to three concepts per second," Yang says, blaming today's smartphone-enhanced, info-overload lifestyle for attention deficit disorder, memory problems and sometimes depression. "We are totally driven by informatics today and don't give our bodies time to process anything."

To run a busy business, the man known in the West as John Young suggests delegating tasks and clear per-project performance metrics for employees instead of keeping track of their hours. Both tricks eliminate time-consuming management duties, he says.