United Airlines CEO says he sleeps 8 ½ hours a night and limits meetings to 'no more than 4 hours a day’

Don't deliberation that United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby is going to beryllium done your descent deck.

"If you want to nonstop a deck, nonstop it to maine successful advance, and past we're conscionable going to talk astir it, but you're not going to publication slides to me," Kirby told Semafor's "CEO Signal" podcast.

Kirby is fiercely protective of his schedule. That's why he caps meetings astatine 4 hours per day, though he said he averages less. It intends keeping the meetings he does person speedy and conversational.

"That gives maine clip to think," he said. "The further you spell successful your career, surely by the clip you're the CEO, your occupation is not to activity hard. It's to deliberation hard."

In Kirby's schedule, "Sleep is the number 1 priority." He said he gets 8 and a half hours a night. He besides has a rotating group of 4 workouts, but if he's walking and his schedule is compressed, it's slumber that remains the key.

The United CEO said he wakes up astatine 5:30 am. He doesn't request an alarm. He'll look astatine emails, but "that's for illustration 5 minutes."

As for the remainder of the day, Kirby said he devotes 3 hours to reading.

"I publication The Wall Street Journal screen to screen and astir apt 15 minutes worthy of The New York Times," he said. "Reading screen to cover, I find each kinds of absorbing worldly that I would've ne'er known if I wouldn't person searched for it."

Most afternoons, Kirby will besides compression successful a 15-to 20-minute nap.

On apical of that, Kirby said he has 5 magazines he'll look through, depending connected erstwhile they arrive. He besides said he sounds astir 2 books a week. His favourite genre is subject fiction.

"But it's really difficult to find bully subject fiction," he said. "Isaac Asimov is my favorite. The champion subject fabrication I've publication successful the past 20 years was astir apt 'The Three-Body Problem.'"

In a 2025 interview, Kirby elaborate immoderate of the things he cuts from his life to prevention clip for what matters.

"I conscionable people don't want to discarded time," Kirby told erstwhile Fast Company editor-in-chief Bob Safian during an question and reply for Safian's "Rapid Response" podcast. "I'm not connected societal media. What a colossal discarded of clip connected societal media. I don't do that. I don't watch TV."

Kirby, who has 7 kids, said erstwhile he's astatine home, he puts them to furniture and takes them to schoolhouse anytime he can.

"So, tons of sleep, tons of clip pinch the family," Kirby told Safian.

All of it comes backmost to what Kirby sees arsenic the scourge of careers: meetings.

"One of the champion things group tin do for their careers, I think, is extremity pinch each the madness of meetings," he said.

Without each those meetings, group person clip for what they really need.

"You request clip to think, to travel up pinch ideas, to beryllium creative, to locomotion around, to talk to different people," he said, "and you can't do it if you're sitting successful meetings each day."