Timeboxing: Elon Musk's Time Management Method

It is no secret that Elon Musk has an insane work schedule, working more than double the hours of the average full-time worker. And now I'm kind of in the 80 to 90, which is more manageable. But if you divide that by two, it's only like maybe 45 hours for a company, which is not much if you're when there's a lot of things going on. You're like a slacker, I mean. Yeah. And that time is split between many different projects. Most of it goes to his main companies, Tesla and SpaceX, but he also spends time on things like The Boring Company and OpenAI, and of course, making flamethrowers. Add to that the fact that, according to Ashley Vance's biography on him, he spends four days a week with his five children, and you've got what is possibly one of the busiest and most hectic daily schedules of anybody on this planet. Now, in contrast to the video that I did about Ben Franklin just a few months ago, with Elon Musk, we don't have a source that gives us a super granular look at his daily schedule, other than a few tidbits that he's revealed in interviews, such as the fact that he spends about 80% of his time on design and engineering, despite what most people might think. I think a lot of people think I must spend a lot of time with media or on business-y things, but actually, almost all my time, like 80% of it is spent on engineering and design. But what we do know about is the method that he uses to keep his schedule organized and to plan out his day. Musk actually plans 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. Essentially, time-boxing, or time-blocking, if you wanna call it that, or, heck, time-bloxing, I'm not gonna stop ya, is the practice of setting a fixed amount of time for each task that you have to do and integrating those blocks of time into your daily schedule. I use this technique a lot with my own work, and because people like Musk and Bill Gates and Cal Newport and many others find it so useful, today I wanted to break down exactly how you can use time-boxing most effectively in your own work. So let's start with the obvious question. Why use this technique? Why time-box your schedule? And I know there are gonna be critics of this technique right off the bat who are gonna say scheduling your entire day in advance basically makes you a robot, dude. Why would you wanna do that? And I gotta say, number one, you humans, I mean, we humans, really give robots a bad rap sometimes. But number two, this is kind of looking at it from the wrong perspective. Yes, scheduling your day in advance does mean that you're gonna be adhering to a predetermined plan and that you're gonna have less unstructured free time. But as you might know, unstructured free time can sometimes be a bad thing. As Parkinson's Law states, work tends to expand to fill the time allotted for it. So essentially, time-boxing creates a useful limitation that can actually make you more productive. First and foremost, it takes a lot of the choice out of the moment of what you're gonna work on because you are adhering to a plan, so you spend less time figuring out what you're gonna do in the first place. And number two, because you have a limited amount of time, you aren't going to waste it. You're gonna be focusing a lot more intently. And in the case of people like Musk and Bill Gates, they probably need to use this technique. They've got so many commitments, so many balls in the air that without pre-planning their schedule and keeping it really, really organized, things are bound to slip through the cracks. Okay, so if I've got you convinced, let's talk about how to use time-boxing. And the simplest way to do it is the way that I like to do it where I write out my daily plan either on my whiteboard or on a piece of notebook paper, and I just estimate the amount of time each task is going to take. So I don't actually put it on a calendar and give it start and stop times of the day. I just say, this is going to take me 20 minutes, and then I'm gonna move on to the next thing. If you're somebody like me who doesn't have a whole lot of scheduled, fixed commitments that start and stop at specific times, then that can work really, really well. And it might also work if you're in school or you're an employee and you have a specific block of time when you already know you're gonna be doing things, and then you have another block of time that's kind of freed up. And if this method does work well for you, you don't have to do it on paper because there is an app called 3030 on the iPhone that I have used several times before. Now, I gotta say, I really don't like the design of this app. The font they chose in this app is kind of terrible, but it is one of the few apps that lets you set a specific time you're going to work on a task and then kind of build a little itinerary of timed tasks that you can then go through. And I used to use this a lot in college when I had a lot of homework assignments to get through. Now, if you are an Android, I don't believe 3030 is on the Android platform, but there is an app out there called Do Now that seems to have a similar function. Now, if you are the kind of person that has a schedule with lots of predetermined commitments already and have gaps in between them, or you just wanna have more structure in your life, then you actually might find it useful to use a calendar for your timeboxing to set specific start and stop times for your tasks. This is the way that Cal Newport says he does it in his blog post on the subject. And if you're a student that has a lot of little gaps of time in between classes, I think this is the way to go for you. Either way, if you're going to use this technique successfully, then the number one thing you're gonna need to learn how to do is properly estimate how long tasks are going to take you to complete. And the bad news is that you and me both are human beings. We both like ingesting organic matter, we both like using our respiratory systems to convert oxygen into carbon dioxide, and we are both naturally bad at estimating how long things are going to take. Did I mention I'm not a robot? We're all susceptible to what's called the planning fallacy, which describes how human beings tend to make over-optimistic predictions for how long things are going to take. There was actually some research done at the University of Waterloo in Canada on this phenomenon. Students were asked to make two different types of time predictions. One was a best-case scenario prediction where literally everything went right, and the other one was for the average-case scenario, your average, everyday, run-of-the-mill experience. And the researchers found that predictions for both types of scenarios were virtually identical, which showed them that human beings tend to picture the best-case scenario where literally nothing goes wrong when they're trying to predict what's gonna happen in an average, everyday case. So even though you know in the back of your head that when you try to get to work on an average day, there's traffic or somebody's driving in front of you really slow on their phone, there's a grandma in front of you, when you predict how long it's gonna take to get to work, you picture the scenario where there's barely any traffic at all and everything is just perfect. And this cognitive bug is not very congruent with successful time-boxing, because if you tend to make super over-optimistic predictions for how long each task is going to take, then you are gonna end up getting less than half of what you plan to get done actually done. So one way to get better at estimating how long your tasks are actually going to take is to track your time. The app that I personally use for this is called Toggle, which is available both on computers and mobile devices. And essentially, you just tell it what you're gonna do, you can give it a tag if you want, and then you start it and stop it once you're done. I found that if you track your time with an app like this, then over time, you start to get a record of how long things actually take, and you can start to see what the discrepancy is between your original estimations and the actual data. From there, you can sort of start calibrating your brain and making better estimations. Also, when you're sitting down to plan your day and you're estimating how long your tasks are gonna take, it's gonna be really helpful if you split your bigger tasks into smaller subtasks. Not only will this make your task list more action-oriented and clear, but it's also gonna help you with your estimations, because it is always easier to estimate how long a small, well-defined task is going to take. All right, so now we have to deal with what is possibly the most legitimate objection to timeboxing, which is, how do you deal with interruptions? How do you deal with things that you couldn't plan for, or things that just pop up and interrupt your work? Tom, the Secret Service wants you again. Again? Well, as Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, planning is everything, plans are nothing. So, when your plan gets interrupted, revise that plan. Cal Newport's time-blocking blog post actually provides a great example of how to do this. He splits his notebook paper into columns and uses the first column as his original plan. Then, if plans change or something gets interrupted during the course of the day, he just revises the plan in the next column and then continues on from there. He also advises designating certain blocks of time as what he calls reactionary time, blocks of time that are literally set up for dealing with those things that come up during the course of the day that you didn't plan for. Now, sometimes things are gonna pop up that you have to deal with right now and they might be in a time block that was planned for something else, and in those cases, you're gonna have to roll with the punches. But if something comes up that you can deal with later, then a reactionary time block is the perfect time to take care of it. One thing that I would add here is don't be discouraged if you're unable to follow your plan to the letter. Life is inherently unpredictable sometimes, but that doesn't mean planning out your day is a flawed tactic. No tactic works 100% of the time. Just do your best to adapt, and then at the end of the day, analyze your plan and see if what interrupted it was something that you need to account for in the future or if it was just a one-time thing. And that brings me to my last but most crucial piece of advice for using this technique effectively. Avoid the temptation to overschedule your day. Yes, Elon Musk is putting in 80 to 90 hour work weeks juggling a zillion things at once, but number one, that dude is a monster, and number two, if you have difficult work on your plate that requires a lot of intense concentration and creativity, sometimes that's all you can do in a given day. Don't try to squeeze work like that into a tiny sliver of time in a day that's already taken up with errands and admin work. As the authors of the book The Four Disciplines of Execution point out, the more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish. So take advantage of the productivity benefits that come from the limitations of timeboxing, but give that difficult creative work the space it deserves and save that mentally easier work for a concentrated batch day. And while we're talking about that more cognitively trivial admin work, if you do happen to want to make that more efficient, then one thing that you might want to try is Audible, which is the world's best place to download and listen to audiobooks. Audiobooks are a big part of my life, and they're a great way to be more efficient with your time since you can listen to them while you're at the gym or while you're commuting to school or work, while you're cooking, while you're doing laundry, basically any time you're doing something that doesn't require a whole lot of attention in itself. Audible has an unmatched library of audiobooks ranging from the bestsellers to lots of obscure titles, so you're gonna be able to find and listen to basically anything that's on your reading list. A membership comes with a credit for one free audiobook every single month, and unused credits roll over from month to month. Also, if you don't like a book, you can exchange it with no questions asked, and if you do happen to cancel, all the audiobooks you've downloaded are yours to keep forever. So if this sounds good to you, you can get a 30-day free trial of their service along with a free audiobook download of your choosing by heading over to audible.com slash Thomas or by texting Thomas to 500-500 on your phone. This month, I'm gonna recommend one of my absolute favorite books of all time, which is Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, which I own both in print and as an audiobook. This is the book that really did the most to rekindle my interest in science, and it also expanded my appetite for learning in different areas. And beyond that motivational aspect, this is really just one of the best and most entertaining overviews of science that I've ever come across, and I think that anyone who wants to be more well-rounded should definitely experience it. So if you wanna start listening to that book or any other audiobook of your choosing, once again, head on over to audible.com slash Thomas or text Thomas to 500-500 on your phone to start that free trial and get your free audiobook download. Big thanks to Audible for sponsoring this video and helping to support this channel, and as always, guys, thank you so much for watching. If you don't wanna miss future videos, definitely get subscribed right there, and you can also download a free copy of my book on how to earn better grades right over there. You might also wanna check out our latest podcast episode right here, which is all about how to become a tea drinker, something that you coffee addicts probably should learn about, or check out one additional video on this channel by smashing your face into your phone screen right around here. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next week.