Time manage like Elon Musk. A quick introduction to ‘Timeboxing’.
“People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.” Elon Musk
Elon Musk is a interesting human being, working 80–100hours a week according to interviews, split between SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company, SolarCity and OpenAI... Between spending about a100hours a week with his companies, spending time with his 7 kids, wife and free time. Thats quite impressive to say the least, but how does he manage his time to have time for all of this?
How does Elon Musk manage his time?
To be able to spend his time effectively between his companies, kids and free time, he is known to use a time management system called Timeboxing or Timeblocking.
Elon plans his day with a designated time window for each task, In 5minute intervals. This Timeboxing/blocking method can be used for lunch times, exercise, answering emails, work tasks, studying sessions and other tasks. That you are meant to complete in a day.
What are the benefits of Timeboxing?
Timeboxing has multiple benefits. Here are some of the basic ones:
- It keeps a record for you to see what you have accomplished at the end of the week to keep you accountable.
- Saves you time by knowing what you are going to, no time to procrastinate between tasks as you have a pre-scheduled day.
3. Another benefit of Timeboxing/timeblocking(designated time for each task)According to Parkinson’s law “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”, this explains why you can procrastinate on a project for weeks but complete it right before the deadline. Thats why planning your day in to increments with a time for every task will be beneficial for productivity as you would work more productively on task to make sure its done during the time window you had planned before the next task. And there for be more productive in your general life or just your work life depending on what you plan.
How to Timebox.
Now that you have found out what Timeboxing is and why is it so beneficial here is a quick guide on how to preform this method of scheduling, planning.
Start out by writing a to-do list on what needs to be done, then guesstimate how long that task will take. Then you write out a daily schedule with 5minute increments. You then place these “blocks/boxes” in to your planner, for example there could be a box from 9:45–10:45 followed by a another box made for a quick 10 minute brake.
Then place out these boxes in your planner allocating time for brakes and varius different tasks like lunch and exercise and last but not least I would recommend allocating some time for tasks that come up during the day that you can’t plan for in advance, and the last step is following this schedule, stopping a task when the time is up even if you are in the middle of it to start working on the next box according to your plan.
Final words.
People may argue that a planning method like this one would turn them into a robot because they have their whole day planned out for them, to those people I would advise only to do it for their workdays or just to accept that thats the sacrifice it takes to preform on a high level like for example Elon Musk.
Thank you for reading my article here on medium, I would love some positive criticism for me to improve my writing in the future, I hope you learnt something.
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/Ralf A.Linderstam
