PPI #171: Timeboxing- Elon Musk’s Time Management Method

Hey, everyone. Today I'm going to break down Elon Musk's secret to time management so that you can become a productivity master. You may have heard that Elon Musk works up to 80 to 100 hours a week. And I'm certainly not suggesting that you work that much. But if you could be as productive as he is in just 40 hours a week, you could definitely achieve a lot more in business, in life.

Hi, my name is Eric Partaker and I've been recognized as the CEO of the year. And I'm also the author of two best selling books, including the Three Alarms. So what is a technique? It's called time boxing. And it's the practice of setting a specific amount of time that you plan to work on each task and then integrating those blocks of time into the schedule of your calendar, into the free space that you have in your calendar outside of any meetings or things that you're doing with other people. And timeboxing incorporates Parkinson's Law, which says that work will expand to fill the time given for its completion. And we've all experienced this. If you give yourself, for example, three hours to complete a task or a presentation or a piece of work, guess what? It's going to take three hours. If you give yourself three days, you'll probably take three days to do it. But can you remember those moments when suddenly you forgot to do something or had put it off too long and you only had maybe 30 minutes to do something that you originally would have maybe dedicated five hours to, and then somehow still in the end you get it done, and that's Parkinson's Law in action. That work will expand to fill the time given for its completion. So once again, if you give yourself time, you know, three hours to complete something, it will take three hours. If you give yourself one hour, you'll get it done in one hour. And this is incredibly powerful because we can harness this law, we can harness this, our work and in our lives so that we can get more done with less time. I have. I'll tell you a story. I remember historically, I always would take far too long to type up summary notes from meetings. And in particular, we had this monthly meeting that we always did at a company that I worked with in the past. And, and I would always kind of put off the write up of these notes because I knew they're going to take long simply because I would give myself so much time to do the notes and I would typically want to allocate 3 hours to write up all the meeting notes and I remember this particular.

Instance where I knew I had a call to do at 6pm and it was 5:39, I remember, and I thought to myself, I have 21 minutes. Can I type up these notes and get them out before that call in 21 minutes? And I couldn't believe it. Instead of taking three hours to get the notes typed up, I literally was able to type them up in just 21 minutes, press send, and I was on the call. And that always has stuck in my mind that I can massively compress the amount of time that I'm working on something and still get a good result, but I have no chance to do it unless I put a box around that. And that phone call that I had to make at 6pm Together with that start time in the moment, that was the box, that was the 21 minutes that I had. What Elon Musk does is that he does this proactively. So I was reacting in the moment to the only amount of time that I had left. But he is proactively. At the start of his day, he's looking at each task that he needs to do, and he's assigning an amount of time to get it done in. Okay, so, you know, I'm going to go into my email and I'm going to put 15 minutes against that. I'm going to complete this research in 30 minutes, and so on and so on and so on. And then he puts those blocks into his calendar and then holds himself to completing the task in the time that he is allocated. Why? Because Parkinson's law states that work will expand to fill the time given for its completion. And obviously he's experiencing that as well. So that's the general concept. At the start of the day, figure out what is that I need to do. List out those tasks, assign times to those tasks, and then put those blocks of time, schedule them, drop them into your calendar. Now, it's not just a matter of doing that, though, because you also then need to obviously keep an eye on the time and measure your progress. Are you actually staying on track as you had planned, or are you falling, you know, behind? Can you make up the time then in that instance, you know, how can you stay on track? Because what you don't want is to completely miss, for example, your first, you know, block of time there and then have that cascade throughout the rest of the day. So what I would suggest you do when you're learning this practice is to give yourself some buffer time. So whatever, however many minutes that you're assuming that you're going to get a task done in, you know, add an extra 20% or 33% at least in the beginning to give yourself a little buffer so that you can develop an understanding of how long does it actually take for you to get certain activities done. Another clever thing that you can do is when you have a whole bunch of little things that you need to do, such as respond to two emails, pick up a voicemail, return a call and check your post. Well, all those little bitty things, try to group them all together in a single time block and give it a single amount of time to get that done, rather than having that stuff kind of drip through fed throughout your day. Because when that happens, it's very, very distracting. And when we become distracted, we become less efficient. So the other thing though that you need to focus on is even though you have your time block set and you know the number of minutes that you're going to be working on a particular task or thing, you also need to make sure that you're actually single tasking so that you're just focused on that. The simple thing that you can do there is to just minimize your distractions and make sure notifications are turned off on various apps that you're focusing. Phone is kind of out of sight, out of mind. Turn it off, for example, put it in another room. You'll be amazed at how much more you get done when you don't have all these devices or notifications around you, constantly competing for your attention or simply distracting you. Now, why should you focus on single tasking? Well, aside from it giving you the best chance of actually getting the time boxing habit and these blocks of time installed correctly. Aside from doing that, there's also some very compelling data and reasons why you should do this, just from a general productivity and kind of life point of view. So there's some startling research which shows that the Average person loses 28% of their workday by not single tasking. What do I mean by that? Instead of working on one thing at a time, as is required when you're using this Elon Musk technique, instead of doing that, they jump from task to task. And look, we've all been there, you know, I'm sure you've sat down. You sit down, for example, at the start of your day, it's nine o', clock, you open up your inbox and you're in your email for a few minutes and now it's 9:07 and suddenly you're checking Slack or some other, you know, collaboration tool and Then you're in there for four minutes and then you're back to your email and then you're thinking, you know, maybe I should research this thing on the, on the net real quick. And so you research something on Google very, very quickly. And then before you know it, you look at the clock and it's like 9:47 now. And you're like, gosh, I don't have any time now to do what I had planned to do in this first hour. I only have 13 minutes before a phone call. And then you think, oh, well, you know, I need to have a fresh cup of coffee for that call. So then now you go downstairs and you reheat your coffee. Look, the end result is because you've been jumping around from one thing to the next so much, you don't get the things done that you want to get done. And often that can feel like you're hanging on to the back of a train and you're not actually in control of your day. You get to the end of the day and you sit there thinking, gosh, where did the day go? I don't feel like I've won this day at all. And that's because you weren't single tasking. So it's not just a matter of using this technique, this time boxing or creating these blocks of time. It's not just a matter of doing that. It's also a matter of actually showing up then at the scheduled times and making sure that you single task. Because going back to the compelling data point that I referenced earlier, when they observe people throughout the day jumping around, as a typical person does, from one task to the the next, that leads to a loss of about 28% of their day. Because think about it like when you start working on something, if you jump around to a bunch of different things, when you return to what it was that you originally intended to work on, you often have to retrace your steps. You have to regain your momentum. Not to mention that the things that you switched yourself to, you know, the things that you started to work on outside of that may have been completely meaningless things that you shouldn't really be doing. So you're losing all of that time as well. When they add all of that up, it leads to a 28% loss in the day. But if you extrapolate that number across a year against the number of work weeks In a year, 28% loss of all the work weeks in a year means that the Average person loses 13 weeks a year, 13 weeks 52 divided by 4, 13 weeks, that's an entire calendar quarter. So, so the average person is losing an entire quarter every year. Or if we extrapolate that up to a career, a 40 year career, the average person loses an entire decade. That's like two more careers. So there is so much in this method and there's so many reasons to do it, and it will not only make you more productive, but the final point that I'm trying to make is that it will also add 13 weeks year back to your life, which you can use for work, for pleasure, over a career or add another decade. And could you use another decade? Would you feel less stressed and more productive if somebody said every single year, here's an extra 13 weeks or over a career, here's an extra decade? Of course you would feel better. Of course you would feel more productive. Of course you would feel like you were a productivity master. You're literally picking up all that extra time. Here's another way to think about it, another fun way to think about it. Like if we're playing a game of basketball and I'm a team, you got your team and you get to the third quarter and then I say to you, oh no, you can't play the fourth quarter. You and your team got to sit out. And you'd be like, what the hell? How do I have a chance? We have no chance of winning. And I'd be like, no, you don't. You have no chance. Sorry. So it's so uncompetitive to live your life, you know, not using these techniques, not trying to single task, not trying to use that Elon Musk method of time boxing and you know, assigning units of time to each task and then putting those blocks, you know, into your calendar. You make yourself incredibly uncompetitive by not doing these things because as a result you, you lose an entire calendar quarter. So you're playing the game of life, you're playing the game of business. With only 3/4 in your year instead of 4. You don't have a chance competitively if you do that. And I'd love to hear from you, so don't forget to leave a comment and a rating as well. And if you'd like to get a copy of my new book, the Three Alarms, please head over to my website@ericpartaker.com that's Eric. Eric Partaker, partaker.com where you can pick up a free digital copy of my new best selling book, the Three Alarms.