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 you know now I'm kinda in the 80 to 90,

which is more manageable

but you know that if you divide that by two it's only like

you know maybe 45 hours per company which is not much

if your world has a lot of things going on.

- [Interviewer] You're like a slacker.

- (laughs) Yeah.

- And that time is split between many different projects,

most of it goes to his main companies Tesla, and Space X.

But he also spends time on things like The Boring Company,

and open AI and of course making flamethrowers.

Add to that the fact that

according to Ashlee Vance's biography on him,

he spends four days a week with his five children.

And you've got what his 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 most people think I must spend

a lot of time with media or on business-y things

but almost all of 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 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.

Essentially time boxing or time blocking

if you want to call it that or heck: time bloxing,

I'm not gonna stop ya,

is the practice of setting 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, 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's going to be critics of this technique

right off the bat who are going to 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 kinda 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 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 lets talk about

how to use time boxing and the simplest way to do it

is the way that I like to do it when I write out

my daily plan either on my white board

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 twenty minutes

and then I'm going to 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 like specific block of time when

you already know you're gonna be doing things

and then you have like another block of time

that's kinda 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 30/30 on the iPhone

that I have used several times before.

Now I gotta say that I really don't like

the design of this app.

the font they chose in this app is kinda 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 kinda like 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 on Android I don't believe 30/30

is on the Android platform

but there is an app out there called Do Now.

It seems to have a similar function.

Now if you are the kinda 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 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 falacy

which describes how human beings tend to

make over optimistic predictions for how long things

are going to take.

Now there's 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 every day 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 going to take 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 the 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 going to 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 going to 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 sorta start calibrating your brain

and make better estimations.

Also when you're sitting down to plan your day

and you're estimating how long it's going to take,

it's gonna be really helpful if you split

your bigger tasks into smaller sub-tasks.

Not only will this make your task list more action oriented

and clear but it's also going to help you with

your estimations because it is always easier to estimate

how long a small well defined task is going to take.

Alright so now we have to deal with what is possibly

the most legitimate objection to time boxing which is,

how do you deal with interruptions?

How do you deal with things that you couldn't plan for,

- [Tom] or things that just pop up and interrupt your work?

- Tom, the secret service wants you again.

- (sighs) Again?

- Well as Dwight D. Eisenhower once said

"planning is everything, plans are nothing."

So when your plans get 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 if 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 setup for dealing

with those things that come up during the course of

the day that you didn't plan for.

Now sometimes things are going to 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 going to 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 that 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 over schedule your day.

Yes, Elon Musk is putting in 80-90 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 pointed 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 time boxing

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 want to make that more efficient

then one thing 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 or 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 best sellers to lots of obscure titles so

you're gonna be able to find and listen to basically

anything that's on your reading list.

The membership comes with 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/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 in print and as an audiobook.

This is the book that really did the most to rekindle

my interest in science and I 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/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.

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You might also want to check out our latest podcast episode

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Thanks for watching and I'll see you next week.