Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has accomplished a lot in his 43 years of life. He’s launched a $100 billion brand, graduated with a fine arts degree in industrial design, befriended a former U.S. president, and has become a bodybuilder. However, work-life balance is tricky.
Automating a Work-Life Balance
The founder has shared that he’s achieved an excellent “work-life balance” for a single person, though he doesn’t believe his current lifestyle is conducive to a family lifestyle. He is the father of a golden retriever named Sophie Supernova, who, Chesky says, “unleashes more energy than an exploding star.”
“I’ve been able to have the luxury of being able to automate things,” Chesky says. This frees him up for exercise, traveling, reading, as well as connecting with friends.
“My parents, growing up, would mow the lawn, clean their house, do the dishes,” he says. “I’ve tried to automate as much as I can, so the time I spend is spent doing either work or true leisure activities and as few logistics as possible.”
The Airbnb CEO emphasizes that it is a “privilege” that he can automate his chores but says that he will sometimes go to the grocery store so he will not “lose [his] mind.”
“I will only do that periodically because I’m working so much,” he says.
The Trick to Managing Life
Chesky’s hack for managing his hectic day-to-day life of a $100 billion Fortune 500 brand is simple: journaling.
“I keep a daily journal and a digital note app, like Apple Notes, and every day I write notes to myself,” Chesky shares, but adds that the journals are not often in complete sentences. “The pros are more like bullet points, and it’s anything that comes [to] mind.”
Among other advice he has given, which includes encouraging CEOs to pick favorites, Chesky has shared his morning routine, which he says begins “pretty late” for an entrepreneur.
The Airbnb CEO’s Daily Routine
Chesky shares that his routine starts “pretty late” at 8:30 a.m., primarily because he “[goes] to bed pretty late.”
However, this later start allows him to focus on productivity, which begins with cardio on the StairMaster or walking his dog. As a former competitive bodybuilder, Chesky says his fitness routine begins with an empty stomach.
“There’s a lot of hills where I live, so I try to do that for like 20 minutes in the morning,” he says. “Then I’ll begin my day.”
Throughout the remainder of his morning, Chesky will eat a light breakfast before heading into Airbnb headquarters. He emphasizes a preference for an “unstructured” workday to do what he describes as “heads-down” work.
“I generally don’t like to have back-to-back meetings,” he says. “I like to have some free time to roam around and to be able to do some heads-down work.”
By the afternoon, he breaks for lunch and goes to work traversing the Airbnb office space to interact with colleagues. After meetings wind down around 6 p.m., he begins his second workout at 7:30 with his personal trainer before returning home.
The evenings involve a mix of personal activities or concentrating on heads-down work. By the time 1:30 a.m. rolls around, he says that he concentrates on sleep.
“[A] non-negotiable is I want to try to get at least seven hours of sleep,” he says, adding that he knows there are people who “go off four, five, even six hours of sleep.” This phenomenon, according to Chesky, is unsustainable, as the “extra hour you save by not sleeping” likely makes each subsequent hour of the next day “a little less productive.”
