This One Time Management Method Makes Elon Musk the Most Successful Entrepreneur.
How to Become Incredibly Successful
Elon Musk is by far one of the most successful entrepreneurs these days. He made his first fortune with PayPal, and these days he serves as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. Rumour has it that he spends about 80–100 hours working.
In his private life, he spent time with his seven kids and his wife. Rumour has it that he also loves gaming on top of that.
The week has 168 hours, of which he uses 50% for work and the rest for regeneration, work-out, quality time with the family, and gaming. The success speaks for itself. Tesla is a well-known brand, as is SpaceX.
How can he accomplish so much every single day? While others struggle with getting a few things done?
“People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.” Elon Musk
Time Management by Elon Musk
The secret of his success lies in his time management skills. Many people struggle with that. They make to-do lists or write down their schedules. Yet, they do not achieve any accomplishments.
What is Elon Musk doing differently?
He uses a technique called.
Timeboxing or Timeblocking
During his professional career, he had enough time to become a true master of this technique. Some even call him superhuman.
So, what exactly is timeboxing?
The Art Explained
One thing is to create a task list for every single day, and the other one is to carry it out.
Elon Musk does it by dividing the day into 5 minutes slots. Then he thinks about how much time he needs to carry out each task. Once he figured this out, he then assigned tasks to time slots in his calendar. It is merging your to-do list for the day with your calendar.
And he executes this task in the given time slot precisely. No matter what happens, and he stays committed. There is no multitasking or doing several things at the same time. One 5 minute slot, one task — nothing more.
The time he assigns to a task is relatively short, and Parkinson’s Law states that.
“work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”
That’s why you can get everything done at the last minute. Unfortunately, many people procrastinate and start working right before the deadline.
Productive people like Elon Musk use this simple method of timeboxing to set a deadline daily.
How does it work?
I had used this method since the mid-90s when I was at university. Sports, Relationships, Club Memberships, 8 hours work daily — I had to get organized to get everything done that I wanted to have in my life.
Without knowing, I have developed a similar method that Elon Musk seems to use. The explanation below is my way.
Know your passion and goals
Time Boxing starts with planning your life goals. You need to know where you want to be in 50 years from now. Or any other period that makes sense in your life.
Looking at Elon Musk, I am pretty sure he has a clear vision of his life in mind. Knowing your goals is key to success, and Ideally, you define goals in areas you are passionate about. If you want to change the way people experience mobility, founding Tesla makes a whole lot of sense.
NOt so much if you are more into martial arts.
Create your task list
I have my rule of 80/20. 80% of my task list contains tasks for areas I am passionate about. And I can do business with. 20% is my playground for trying out new things.
I was more strict when I was younger, but I learned I needed to try out new things once in a while. Learning a novel skill for no other reason than having the learning process for that skill experienced is part of my personality. Not honoring that has a negative emotional impact on my life.
Every evening before I go to sleep, I sit down for 15 minutes and think about my tasks for the next day. And write them down in my notebook, and I use GoodNotes on my iPad.
And write it down with the Apple pen. Handwriting slows down the process and makes me think carefully about every task I want to see accomplished the next day.
The maintenance tasks like sleep, breakfast, lunch, exercise are already sticky in my calendar. As I have them organized as routines, I do not need to reconsider these actions daily.
The only tasks I write down are the work-related ones in my core focus areas, and only those go on my to-do list.
Assign timeslots in your calendar
The first two parts are necessary, but nothing new. In the third step, it is where the magic happens:
Assign each task to a timeslot in your calendar.
Elon Musk has divided every hour into 5-minute increments, and I go with 15 minutes that works fine with me. In the third step, I think about how much time I want to invest until I get one task done.
Sometimes in the process, I realize that I can break up big tasks into even smaller ones and get them done one step at a time, like writing an article.
- Concept phase,
- writing phase,
- re-reading phase,
- perfection phase,
- publishing.
For example, as my smallest increment is 15 minutes, I assign 15 minutes to the concept phase. It means I sit down for 15 minutes and think about a concept around a topic I want to write about.
Writing takes longer, so I assign 60 minutes to write. It means I sit down and write for 15 minutes. And so on.
Once I have figured out how much time I want to invest, I allocate the task in my calendar. For example:
Concept writing from 10:15. And precisely this amount of time I take to complete the task. Fifteen minutes on the minute, and no minute less and no minute more.
Whatever result I have after these 15 minutes, I have to live with it.
Focus — no multitasking.
The second important part of this concept is Focus. Within every 15 minute timeslot, there is just this one task of importance.
No phone calls — my mobile is turned off. No eMails. My email client is turned off. There are other timeslots for such tasks.
But what if someone calls? I do not care. If it is something important, the person leaves a message or writes a mail. If it is not essential and I get no message, why should I worry?
Usually, I arrange appointments with people. Also, here, I use the same method. I agree on 15, 30, 45, or 60 minutes meetings, and the workshop can last longer. Every meeting has an agenda and an expected outcome.
The sweet thing is, I give my undivided attention to the meeting attendees: no mobile, no mails, no interruptions.
Since I started using this method, I have accomplished everything I want during the day. It wasn’t easy initially to get into the flow, but I got the hang of it after a few months. Well, as I have used it since the mid-90s, it has become second nature.
People who master this method eventually become very successful. If they are committed every day and have a big vision like Elon Musk, maybe they will find the next big thing.
Check out
- my other profiles,
- sign up for my newsletter,
- or subscribe to my medium profile for frequent updates
