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.
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 want to check out our latest podcast episode
right here which is all about how to become a tea drinker
something that you coffee addicts should probably 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.
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