It is no secret that Elon Musk has an insane work schedule working more than double the hours of the average full-time worker.
Elon Musk stated that he works more than 80 hours a week, and that time is divided between his companies. Elon is famous for his companies, Tesla and SpaceX, but he also has two smaller companies that are not as well known.
With such a hectic workweek and owning multiple companies, he had to find a productivity system that worked for him.
Musk plans out his day in five minute increments, and has everything pre-planned in advance. This is a technique called Time Boxing, and it's actually used by lots of other people including Bill Gates and Cal Newport. Though Cal calls it Time Blocking.
You may not own one or two companies, but perhaps you have a robust schedule and need a specific way to be productive.
To start with, time boxing is deciding on how many boxes of time you need for the task. Then you assign the task to those boxes. You may need four boxes for one task, giving each box a 15-minute time limit.
Due to the vast number of tasks he has, Elon uses 5-minute time boxes. With this method, he lays out his entire day and knows exactly what he will be doing. There is no room for stopping and wondering what to do next in Elon’s world.
Elon Musk stated that most of the time, his Time Boxing involves design concepts and engineering.
With his planning, Elon decides ahead of time what he will be working on for the full day, which might be 16 or 18 hours long.
Most people do this time of preplanning the night before; however, Elon has stated in the past that he sleeps very little, so it may be possible that he does his preplanning very early in the morning before the actual work day.
Time boxing is a productivity method you should investigate, and lets go over briefly how Elon would do time boxing.
– Sit down before bedtime and write a list of everything you need to accomplish the next day.
– The next part will not be easy, but if you stick with it and practice, you will get the hang of it. You will need to decide how many time boxes you will need to complete the tasks on your list.
We will use work tasks only for the example, but you need to time box from the moment you wake up until you go to bed. Each time box will be 15 or 30 minutes. For example, if your first work task of the day is to meet with your team and motivate them to make sales, such as real estate, life insurance, or the automotive industry, then you might choose 3-time boxes of 15 minutes each.
In each box, note what you need to do and be prepared to wrap up at the 15-minute mark so people can get those sales ringing in.
– Since you are time boxing the entire day at work, do not forget to put in breaks, lunches, and a few boxes to deal with fires.
We know that on a hectic day, a problem will crop up. To stick to a schedule, you need to keep working your time boxes, and when the “fire box or boxes” comes up in your schedule, put on your fire hat and dowse the issue.
– Now that you have the time boxes figured out, put them into your calendar. You can use a paper planner, google calendar, or even a time box planner. Use what works best for you.
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