By Eric Mack, Columnist, Inc.com @EricCMack

The Microsoft founder and world’s richest person has a surprisingly simple nighttime routine.

You might think that the world’s richest man, who spends his days fighting malaria and traveling the world doing wealthy philanthropist stuff, wouldn’t have time to do many chores. But in fact, Bill Gates makes time to clean up after dinner.

“I do the dishes every night,” Gates said during a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session.

Once the dishes are clean and his fingers look a little more like prunes, Gates turns his attention to a good book at bedtime.

The tech legend is a voracious reader and he even takes the time to blog and vlog about his favorite books.

It’s a simple nightly routine that many of us probably know well, and there’s scientific research that backs up its benefits.

While we might think of breaking dishes as a good way to de-stress, it’s certainly more expensive and adds one more task of picking up the pieces to your endless to-do list.

Instead, a study that came out of Florida State University in 2015 found that practicing mindfulness techniques while washing dishes can decrease stress.

A number of people and researchers have gone on to link the meditative state often reached doing mindless tasks like washing dishes with boosting creativity.

Reading before bed as Gates does has also been shown to reduce stress in scientific studies.

And of course all that reading is certainly part of Gates’ creative fuel and the way he shapes his understanding of the world that he strives to improve through the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

I think it’s a safe bet that he won’t be proposing a dishwashing machine for every home as his next global initiative anytime soon.