'It doesn’t feel like work to respond': Airbnb CEO ditches email and texts staff instead. Why after-hours pings are adding to workers’ stress

Among big-company CEOs who’ve talked publicly about how they communicate, he’s in the minority. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Uber’s Dara Khosrowshahi, for example, still do a lot of their managing over email.

Most office workers couldn’t skip email if they tried, since Microsoft 365 users get 117 emails a day on average and give most of them less than a minute, according to a report published June by Microsoft.

Why Chesky ranks email last

Chesky told Time that if he had to rank how he likes to communicate, face-to-face conversations would come first, then Zoom, then texting, with email likely in last place. Emails start with a subject line, he pointed out, whereas a text goes straight to someone.

When something needs fixing, he’d rather sit down with the person, call them or fire off a text than open his inbox.

Which CEOs still run their companies by email?

Then there’s Huang, 63, CEO of chipmaker Nvidia [NASDAQ:NVDA], who works almost the opposite way. Nvidia staff have long emailed him short notes known inside the company as “Top-5 Things” — each a rundown of what they’re working on and noticing. He goes through those notes daily to catch early hints of where the business is heading, The Wall Street Journal reported in December, 2024.

Over at ride-hailing company Uber [NYSE:UBER], CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, 57, wants his staff to answer emails on weekends. On a Feb. 23 episode of The Diary of a CEO, he said anyone who doesn’t answer his Saturday email can expect a pointed follow-up from him on Sunday.

Late-night work is creeping up for everyone else, too. The number of meetings kicking off after 8 p.m. rose 16% in a year, according to Microsoft’s report, and a typical employee now trades more than 50 messages outside the 9-to-5.

In Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index survey of 31,000 knowledge workers across 31 markets, 48% of employees and 52% of leaders said their work feels “chaotic and fragmented.”

How to reach a boss who barely uses email

You can simply ask your manager (maybe during your next one-on-one) where they prefer to read work messages, whether that’s email, Slack, Teams, or even texts.