How to Work Like Elon Musk and Supercharge Your Productivity

Productivity continues to be a hard-to-crack safe for a lot of folks around the world. It would have been easy to say there’s just a cap to how much one person can achieve within a day. But when you look at Elon Musk and how much the world’s richest person takes on, it becomes clear just how much you can push your limit of productivity with the right strategy.

The week contains 168 hours, of which Elon Musk leverages half for work and the rest for relaxation, exercise, quality time with family, and gaming. The results speak for themselves. Tesla, like SpaceX, is a thriving brand.

But it takes more than simply getting on board with a proven productivity technique to start seeing results. You need to answer the questions; are you willing to challenge how you work everyday? Will you wholly commit your schedule to Elon Musk’s timeboxing technique? Will you persevere? 

If your answer to these questions is yes, then let’s dive into timeblocking. 

What is timeblocking? 

It is the practice of setting a fixed amount of time for each task you’re going to do and integrating the resulting time block into your schedule. 

So let’s say you want to write, read a book, and work on a design project. Using this to-do list, you might end up spending too much time on writing, and anxiety sets in over the two other untouched tasks. 

How does timeblocking fix this? You’ll assign a particular timeframe to each task. So let’s say 30 minutes for writing, 30 minutes for reading a book, and 30 minutes for your design project. What this means is that your work schedule is no longer dependent on tasks but on time itself. So if your assigned 30 minutes of writing elapses, you’ll have to move to the next task. Rinse and repeat the process till you’ve made reasonable progress. This ensures that by the end of your work day, every task on your to-do list gets some work. 

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Bear in mind that one of the most crucial aspects of the timeboxing technique is estimating just how much time it’ll take to perform a certain task. Getting this right will increase the number of tasks you can complete as you move through your schedule.

But as humans, we don’t have machine precision in determining how long a task will last. So time yourself, especially with routines, and get the best estimates. Don’t forget to make some reactionary time for unplanned tasks or to deal with distractions. 

Time to Test Your Resolve

There are apps like Hourstack which are available on both android and IOS that helps to streamline your timeblocking effort. However, if you work a lot on your computer, then google calendar is the ultimate free time blocking tool. 

Check out this video illustrating how you can timeblock on Google Calendar. 

Warning” Don’t Get Overwhelmed

While Elon Musk is using time blocking to supercharge his productivity, his schedule might be a lot different from yours. If you’re in corporate, you probably don’t have as much control of your schedule as Elon Musk. Deliverables and deadlines can somewhat force you out of your time-blocking plans. 

It’s nothing to feel bad about when you’re not exactly timeblocking like the productivity monster, Elon Musk. But as long as you’re adapting your everyday schedule to this productivity hack, you can rest assured that you’ll find footing and dramatically increase just how much you achieve within a day.

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