Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky gave Fortune an exclusive look at his daily routine.
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00:00So I keep like a daily journal.
00:02They're not complete sentences of prose,
00:04they're more like bullet points.
00:05And it's anything that comes to my mind, idea, anything.
00:08At the end of every week, I'll go through all my old notes
00:10and I'll highlight or bold the notes I like.
00:13Those notes get consolidated into a notebook of ideas.
00:17Then I have to take action on them if I think they're really good.
00:20Then I create a giant to-do list
00:22and then I assign that work to people, say,
00:24I'll call them and knock down the list, like,
00:26hey, we should do this, we should do this, we should do this.
00:28And then every year, I basically write all the major things I accomplish.
00:32So I'll write ahead of time all the things I think I want to accomplish.
00:34At the end of the year, I look and I compare lists year over year.
00:37So I'm pretty systematic.
00:39I take a lot of notes and I organize those notes.
00:41Hi, my name is Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb,
00:45and this is my daily routine.
00:47My daily routine starts pretty late because I go to bed pretty late.
00:50I'll go to bed at like 1, 1.30, maybe even sometimes later.
00:53So I'll wake up maybe around 8, 8.30, something like that.
00:56Most mornings, I wake up and the first thing I try to do
00:59is do a little bit of cardio.
01:01I'll either go on StairMaster at the gym,
01:03or maybe I'll walk my dog.
01:05I'll shower, I'll eat. I like breakfast.
01:07I drink one to two cups, typically, of just black coffee
01:10without any milk or sugar.
01:12I usually go in the office Tuesday through Friday.
01:14Mondays, my executive team is distributed.
01:16Most of them are in San Francisco, so that meeting's Zoom.
01:18Sometimes I'll go in on Monday.
01:20Usually, I'll just do the meetings from home on Zoom in my home office.
01:23When I'm in San Francisco, and I'm probably in San Francisco
01:25at least three weeks a month during the week,
01:27I'll be in the office.
01:29I typically will have meetings from around 10 to 6,
01:32but I try to keep my day a little bit unstructured.
01:34So I generally don't like to have back-to-back meetings.
01:37I like to have some free time to roam around
01:39and to be able to do some heads-down work.
01:41I'll do emails kind of throughout the day.
01:43A way I'll take a break is I might just like...
01:45The office is like a pretty large physical space,
01:47so I'll walk the office, go downstairs to get a drink.
01:51I usually eat at like 9, 12, 3, 6, 9, 30
01:56because I'm working out.
01:57So it's five meals a day.
01:58So that'd be noon or 12, 30.
02:00The only caveat is I do a little bit of intermittent fasting, too,
02:04where I found that's kind of helpful.
02:07It just kind of lowers your blood sugar in your body.
02:09So I'll work in the office until about 6, maybe about 7.
02:12Then I'll head to the gym.
02:13Gym is around 7, 30, 8 o'clock.
02:15I'll do weights four times a week.
02:17I have a personal trainer.
02:18They keep me undisciplined.
02:19I'll train and do like a half-hour cardio after.
02:22Then I'll come home, and then half the nights
02:25I probably like just do personal stuff.
02:27I might have a dinner with somebody.
02:28I might hang out.
02:29I might read, draw, watch something on TV,
02:32do phone calls with friends.
02:33The other half-time I might be working.
02:35If I'm working at night, I'm probably sometimes calling people.
02:38Sometimes I'll call employees that are available at night to check in,
02:40or I'll do really heads-down work.
02:42I could be writing from like 10 a.m. to 1 a.m.
02:46Now, I'm not doing it every night,
02:47but if I really want to do some deep work, I'll do that.
02:50Then I go to bed, and I repeat.