Elon Musk – love him or hate him, everyone agrees – he’s the ultimate high-performance person. A productivity machine of cosmic proportions. Enterprising entrepreneurs would be ultimately satisfied with creating just 1 of the unlikely companies he built, but no, he did at least 2: Tesla, SpaceX, and he seems to be onto something really interesting with X. Remember: this guy single-handedly made the electric car a thing, and started shooting rockets into space! So, how did he manage all that?

We have a glimpse at how Elon Musk likes to schedule his days. There’s a secret weapon involved, and in this article I’m going to tell you everything you need to know about it. That secret weapon is called Timeboxing.

Timeblocking vs timeboxing

Do not be afraid, there’s nothing too complicated about time-boxing. You may have actually heard a similar term called time-blocking, and the difference between the two can be hard to get, but in simplest terms: time blocking is when you say: tomorrow – it’ll take these two hours to work on this task or project, and then I’ll move on to this next time-block with this next task. So it’s not a requirement in timeblocking that you complete the task during the blocked period.

Now, time-boxing, which is the absolute best ever approach to productivity, is a different way to plan your schedule, and it is the preferred method of planning for Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and many other successful CEOs. Unlike time-blocking, time-boxing works like this: you schedule a period of time for each of your tasks, and you aim to complete each task during its respective period.

For example, I have to write a monthly report for my boss, and I estimate that I need about 30 minutes to get it done. I allocate these 30 minutes in my daily plan at a specific time. Now I know that when I get to that point in my schedule, this is what I need to be doing. Not only that, but I know I have 30 minutes to finish this task. That’s it – 30 minutes. There is no other time. And you do that for each of your tasks during your day. You can see in the embedded video how it works.

Timeboxing and planning your daily tasks

With Timeboxing, you have to become the king of planning and estimating. Many people would say: I cannot predict how long this thing is going to take me. To you I say three things: 1) It doesn’t have to be super-accurate, you only need a rough estimation; you’re not an accountant, you just want to get things done; 2) Come up with target or benchmark times for each task and try to make them unrealistically short and challenging; this is the only way that you’d achieve high performance at least remotely similar to that of Elon, and 3) Even if a task turns out to take much longer than expected, which happens often, or the plan has to change because something urgent took place – what you do is you just adapt the plan, update it, and continue from there, with the new plan of time-boxed tasks.

So this is what timeboxing is. You box a period of time, with the goal of completing a certain task within that period. Now, when you hear that people like Elon Musk or Bill Gates work with timebox increments of 5 minutes, it means that the smallest possible box of time they could assign is 5 minutes long. It doesn’t mean they don’t do 30-minute tasks or 1hr tasks, but they might go as low as 5 minutes, and then the other possible intervals will be 10, 15, 20 minutes and so on.

OK, so this is the planning method that Elon and many other hyper-productive CEOs use, and by all means the best tool to use time-boxing is the calendar (you didn’t think they’d leave this to luck, did you). You don’t need to-do lists, reminders, timers and what not, you just need a good, preferably digital, calendar that’s convenient to use, like Google Calendar.

The calendar is your task list, but it’s not just a list, it contains in it also the dimension of how long each task is expected to take, and you have a beautiful overview of your whole week’s worth of tasks. This is the best way to use time-boxing.

This is how you take control of your time resource and you allocate it deliberately.

Now, some of you may say: well, operating like this, am I not becoming like robot who’s just programmed to do tasks one after the other. Well, in a way you are. This whole thing is a process of programming your time, and then you’re expected to execute the program, but what’s the alternative? I’ll tell you what the alternative is: always feeling like there’s too much to be done and too little time; a whole day or a whole week passing without you knowing where your time actually went; becoming a slave to moment-to-moment distractions like social media feeds and useless water cooler talks… This is what happens when you don’t guard and carefully allocate your time, especially on days when your energy and willpower aren’t on point.

So, do it like Elon and use timeboxing! Of course, there are many many other tools and techniques that go into reducing stress at the workplace and achieving insane impact.

If you’d like me to help you with that, feel free to book a FREE 15-minute consulting call, or go straight into a deep-dive 60-min performance coaching session, so we can work out a complete strategy for overcoming any challenges you have in front of you!