United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby sleeps 8.5 hours a night, limits meetings to 4 hours a day

Despite running one of the world’s largest airlines, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby goes to great lengths to avoid being too busy.  He works out nearly every day, sleeps about eight and a half hours a night, and usually finds time for a 15-minute nap.  “Sleep is the number one priority,” he recently told Semafor.  Kirby also reads three hours a day, including a good chunk of The New York Times and the print version of The Wall Street Journal, cover to cover. “I find all kinds of interesting stuff that I never would have known,” he says. “I wouldn’t have searched for it.”  Kirby, who also reads an average of five magazines and two books per week, says reading “is the number one thing you can do to connect dots . . . that other people don’t see.” He also has a rule that limits his meeting time to four hours per day. When he does have meetings, he prefers to keep them conversational and light on presentation. “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,” he says.  The purpose of all of this? To stay focused on the big picture.  “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,” he says.  Kirby, who earned more than $30 million last year, is the former president of US Airways and American Airlines. He was named president of United in 2016 and became CEO three years later.  Despite having an analytical background—he earned a degree in operations research and is good enough at blackjack to have been banned from several casinos—Kirby thinks executives who spend too much time obsessing over “yesterday’s metrics” are taking the wrong approach. “People make a huge mistake thinking that the answer is in the spreadsheet, that the math can solve all the problems,” he says.  Instead, his priority is to concentrate on the future. “My job is to be focused over the horizon,” Kirby says, and to see “what’s coming that no one else sees yet.”

Editorial note: This article was created by A Bit Lavish Miami’s Magazine as an original editorial reinterpretation based on publicly available reporting. Original source: fastcompany.com. Read the original article here: https://www.fastcompany.com/91607799/united-airlines-ceo-scott-kirby-sleeps-8-5-hours-a-night-limits-meetings-to-4-hours-a-day.
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