Name: Airbnb’s 43-year-old CEO built a Fortune 500 giant— here is his daily routine
Uploaded: 2025-02-14
Duration: 2 min 52 s
Description: Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky gave Fortune an exclusive look at his daily routine.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky gave Fortune an exclusive look at his daily routine.

Airbnb’s 43-year-old CEO built a Fortune 500 giant— here is his daily routine

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Airbnb's 43-year-old CO build a Fortune 500 giant— Inside his daily routine

Inside the daily routine of Airbnb’s CEO 

So I keep like a daily journal. They're not complete sentences. The pros are more like bullet points, and it's anything that comes to my mind, idea, anything. At the end of every week I'll go through all my old notes and I'll highlight or bold the notes I like. Those notes get consolidated into a notebook of ideas. Then I have to take action on them if I think they're really good. Then I create a giant to do list and then I assign that work to people, say I'll call them and knock down a list like, Hey, we should do this, we should do this, we should do this. And then every year. I basically write all the major things I accomplished, so I'll write ahead of time all the things I think I want to accomplish. At the end of the year I look and I compare list year over year. So I'm pretty systematic. I take a lot of notes and I organize those notes. Hi, my name is Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, and this is my daily routine. My daily routine starts pretty late because I go to bed pretty late. I go to bed at like 1, 1:30, maybe even sometimes later, so I'll wake up maybe around 8, 8:30, something like that. Most mornings I wake up. The first thing I try to do is do a little bit of cardio. I'll either go on a stairmaster at the gym, or maybe I'll walk my dog. I'll shower. I'll eat a light breakfast, and I drink 1 to 2 cups, typically of just black coffee without any milk or sugar. I usually go in the office Tuesday through Friday. Mondays. My executive team is distributed. Most of them aren't in San Francisco, so that meetings Zoom. Sometimes they'll go in on Monday. Usually I'll just do the meetings from home on Zoom in my home office. When I'm in San Francisco, and I'm probably in San Francisco at least 3 weeks a month. During the week I'll be in the office. I typically will have meetings from around 10 to 6, but I try to keep my day a little bit unstructured, so I generally don't like to have back to back meetings. I like to have some free time to roam around and to be able to do some head down work. I'll do emails kind of throughout the day. A way I'll take a break is I might just like the office is like a pretty large physical space, so I'll walk to the office, go downstairs to get a drink. I usually eat at like 9, 12, 369. 30 because I'm working out, so it's 5 meals a day, so there'll be noon or 12:30. The only caveat is like I do a little bit of like intermittent fasting too where like I found that's kind of helpful. It just kind of lowers your blood sugar in your body. So I'll work in the office till about 6, maybe about 7, then I'll head to the gym. Gym is around 7:30, 8 o'clock. I'll do weights 4 times a week. I have a personal trainer. They keep me undisciplined. I'll train and do like a half hour of cardio after, then I'll come home. And then half the nights I probably like to do personal stuff. I might have a dinner with somebody. I might hang out, I might read, draw, watch something on TV, do phone calls with friends. The other half time I might be working. If I'm working at night, I'm probably sometimes calling people. Sometimes I'll call employees that are available at night to check in, or I'll do a really heads downward, you know, I might, I could be writing from like 10 a.m. to 1 a.m. Now I'm not doing it every night, but if I really want to do some deep work, I'll do that. And then I go to bed and I repeat.