MrBeast says his schedule is planned “to the minute” as Beast Games pushed him to 20-hour days

A schedule with very little breathing room

A new documentary from Jon Youshaei offers a closer look at how MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, handles his professional life when several giant projects are all happening at once. The answer, unsurprisingly, is that he mostly does not handle it with anything resembling spare time.

Youshaei’s video, How MrBeast works 18 hours a day, follows Donaldson through his routine and shows how rigidly his days were organized while he was filming Beast Games.

When asked how he managed his time while balancing his main YouTube channel and the Amazon Prime Video series, Donaldson made the situation sound exactly as frantic as it looks.

“It was a miracle if a day was less than 15 hours for me. My schedule is literally planned down to the minute,” he said.

Even the thumbnails get a rehearsal

The documentary also shows one of the more absurdly efficient parts of his operation: thumbnail shoots. Because apparently even the internet’s most engineered images need pre-production.

Donaldson explained that his team uses a floor grid and stand-ins to practice the setup before he steps in.

“For example, our thumbnails, like our grid system that we lay out on the floor. We have stand-ins practice the photos before me.”

The video shows those stand-ins, essentially thumbnail stunt doubles, rehearsing poses and placements so the final shoot can move as quickly as possible. One of them described the job with the kind of dry practicality that suggests this is now just a normal Tuesday.

“Part of my face gets edited out anyway, but I try to get into it like I’m actually falling. I’m here 9 to 5 Monday through Friday as of right now,” the stand-in said.

Beast Games made the grind even longer

The documentary makes clear that Donaldson’s workflow is built around shaving off as much time as possible, even in places most people would assume already move fast.

Later in the video, he said that during Beast Games filming, his workdays could stretch to 20 hours. He also described having to bounce between filming for Beast Games and producing content for his main channel, then jumping straight back into the show’s schedule.

“I’m doing 12, 15, sometimes 18 or 20-hour days on Beast Games, and then I’m turning around and having to go shoot main channel content, just to go back to the Beast Games grind. That was a lot.”

Beast Games season 2 finished airing in February 2026, and a third season has already been confirmed.