Don’t think that United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby is going to sit through your slide deck.
“If you want to send a deck, send it to me in advance, and then we’re just going to talk about it, but you’re not going to read slides to me,” Kirby told Semafor’s “CEO Signal” podcast.
Kirby is fiercely protective of his schedule. That’s why he caps meetings at four hours per day, though he said he averages less. It means keeping the meetings he does have quick and conversational.
“That gives me time to think,” he said. “The further you go in your career, certainly by the time you’re the CEO, your job is not to work hard. It’s to think hard.”
In Kirby’s schedule, “Sleep is the number one priority.” He said he gets eight and a half hours a night. He also has a rotating set of four workouts, but if he’s traveling and his schedule is compressed, it’s sleep that remains the key.
The United CEO said he wakes up at 5:30 am. He doesn’t need an alarm. He’ll look at emails, but “that’s like five minutes.”
As for the rest of the day, Kirby said he devotes three hours to reading.
“I read The Wall Street Journal cover to cover and probably 15 minutes worth of The New York Times,” he said. “Reading cover to cover, I find all kinds of interesting stuff that I would’ve never known if I wouldn’t have searched for it.”
Most afternoons, Kirby will also squeeze in a 15-to 20-minute nap.
On top of that, Kirby said he has five magazines he’ll look through, depending on when they arrive. He also said he reads about two books a week. His favorite genre is science fiction.
“But it’s really hard to find good science fiction,” he said. “Isaac Asimov is my favorite. The best science fiction I’ve read in the last 20 years was probably ‘The Three-Body Problem.'”
In a 2025 interview, Kirby detailed some of the things he cuts from his life to save time for what matters.
“I just naturally don’t want to waste time,” Kirby told former Fast Company editor-in-chief Bob Safian during an interview for Safian’s “Rapid Response” podcast. “I’m not on social media. What a colossal waste of time on social media. I don’t do that. I don’t watch TV.”
Kirby, who has seven kids, said when he’s at home, he puts them to bed and takes them to school anytime he can.
“So, lots of sleep, lots of time with the family,” Kirby told Safian.
All of it comes back to what Kirby sees as the scourge of careers: meetings.
“One of the best things people can do for their careers, I think, is stop with all the madness of meetings,” he said.
Without all those meetings, people have time for what they actually need.
“You need time to think, to come up with ideas, to be creative, to walk around, to talk to other people,” he said, “and you can’t do it if you’re sitting in meetings all day.”
