Top 10 Elon Musk Productivity Secrets for Insane Success.

There’s no getting away from the fact that Elon Musk has an unbelievable work ethic, as the CEO or founder of companies such as Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, SolarCity, Hyperloop, OpenAI & NeuraLink, he certainly knows how to time manage and have a high level of productivity. It wouldn’t be far fetched to say that Musk is smarter than the average individual with enormous ambition and drive, but we think that us mere mortals can incorporate some of his productivity secrets into our daily lives.

In this blog post, we wanted to cover the top 10 Elon Musk productivity secrets for insane success based on his biography, numerous interviews with him, and countless individuals that have worked with Elon.

Here are the top 10 productivity secrets of Elon Musk work ethic and how you can apply them:

#1 Start the Day with Critical Work

As the CEO of three companies — Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink — Elon Musk has a lot of things to stay on top on a day to day basis. That’s why he starts his day with his most critical work. For Musk, this means dealing with important emails that he needs to address in order to unblock other people’s work and progress.

He typically starts the day at 7am and replies to critical email for at least half an hour, Musk is careful to filter anything that is not deemed critical, focusing on only the more important items. In his own words at the USC commencement speech:

“FOCUS ON SIGNAL OVER NOISE. DON’T WASTE TIME ON STUFF THAT DOESN’T ACTUALLY MAKE THINGS BETTER.”

How to apply this productivity secret: Find your most important task (MIT) for the day and tackle it first. Your MIT should be the one thing that creates the most impact on your work. For example, writing these blog posts is my most important task, that’s why I always start the day with sitting down and writing at least 1,000 words before moving onto another task.

What’s your most important task? Use the 80/20 rule to help you figure it out and get in the habit of doing it before moving to anything else.

#2 Use Feedback Loops

It goes without saying that Musk has a very tight schedule, often working at multiple locations at different times of the day and whilst he tries to better optimize his time, he admits he hasn’t read any time management books but did share some insightful advice on how to become better:

“I THINK IT’S VERY IMPORTANT TO HAVE A FEEDBACK LOOP WHERE YOU’RE CONSTANTLY THINKING ABOUT WHAT YOU’VE DONE AND HOW YOU COULD BE DOING IT BETTER.”

An important part of Elon Musk’s work ethic is to incorporate not only his own feedback but also of others – he urges entrepreneurs to seek preferably negative feedback. While it might be hurtful at first, you normally end up getting a lot more out it. He also focuses on hiring the best people in any field that can provide consistent and truthful feedback which helps to shorten the feedback loop, leading to increased efficiency, faster implementation, and a better-finished product.

How to apply this productivity secret: The best thing about this particular Elon Musk productivity secret is that it works for both your professional and personal life. Speak to those around you and find out where you can become better.

#3 Reason from First Principles

A first principle is a basic assumption that can’t be deduced from any other proposition. It’s the only sure thing in a complex problem. Musk reasons from first principles, rather than by analogy (such as previous experiences). This way you build your reasoning from the ground up.

“YOU LOOK AT THE FUNDAMENTALS AND CONSTRUCT YOUR REASONING FROM THAT AND THEN SEE IF YOU HAVE A CONCLUSION THAT WORKS OR DOESN’T WORK. AND IT MAY OR MAY NOT BE DIFFERENT FROM THAT PEOPLE HAVE DONE IN THE PAST. IT’S HARDER TO THINK THAT WAY, THOUGH.”

Here’s an example of first principles reasoning from Elon Musk himself:

• “What is a rocket made of?
  • Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber.
    • Then I asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market?”

It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around 2% of the typical price, instead of buying a rocket for millions of dollars, Musk decided to purchase the raw materials for cheap and build the rockets himself with his own company SpaceX.

How to apply this productivity secret: Reasoning from first principles forces you to think differently. First-principles is about getting to the root cause of the problem and breaking it down into its basic elements. There are three main steps to apply this thinking framework:

1. Identify and define current assumptions: When faced with a problem, write down your current assumptions about it.
2. Break it down into the fundamental principles: Find the most basic truths or elements of the problem.
3. Create new solutions: If you deconstructed the problem following the first two steps, you are now ready to create new solutions from scratch.

#4 Use Asynchronous Communication

Elon Musk dictates that he prefers to communicate on his own terms. That means defaulting to email and texts, both of which are asynchronous ways of communication.

Musk likes to use communication tools that are not instant and tries to make himself hard to reach for people outside of his company by using an obscure email address which lets him focus on important work for his companies.

How to apply this productivity secret: Put your phone on do not disturb mode and place your phone in another room, install browser extensions that manage your time spent on certain social networking websites and more. It is important to focus on what Cal Newport calls ‘Deep Work‘. Progress comes from being focused and performing this deep work for extended periods of time. This means living as asynchronous as possible with minimal interruptions from coworkers.

Here are three solutions to start working on your terms in order of difficulty:

1. Turn off notifications. Shut down all notifications on your phone, computer, and any other devices or gadgets that may break your focus. Don’t worry, if it’s truly important whoever needs to contact you will call.
2. Decline meetings. Don’t agree to a meeting unless there is a clear agenda and you know the expected outcome; if possible, use email instead.
3. Work remotely. A noisy office means distractions whereas working from home in silence. Minimize distractions in your daily life in order to make progress in meaningful work.

#5 Master Communication

When Musk is not building rockets or revolutionizing the automobile industry, there’s one place you can always find him: on email. He joked at a conference: “I do a lot of email — very good at email. That’s my core competency”.

Elon is known for being extremely clear, concise, and direct on his emails. For example, read the email sent to his entire staff about the use of acronyms.

“PEOPLE WORK BETTER WHEN THEY KNOW WHAT THE GOAL IS AND WHY. IT IS IMPORTANT THAT PEOPLE LOOK FORWARD TO COMING TO WORK IN THE MORNING AND ENJOYING WORKING.”

How to apply this productivity secret: According to a study at Carleton University, a third of the workweek of the “typical” knowledge worker is spent on email, that’s why mastering communication over email is an art form. In an email every word counts, here are some tips on how to master communication over email:

1. Keep it short. Don’t write ten sentences when two suffice. To practice this, take an email you’ve already written in a normal fashion and edit it down to half the words, making sure to avoid certain words and phrases like “I feel”, “I’m not sure”, “perhaps”, using a passive voice, or any adverbs that waste time for both you and your recipient that can cause confusion.
2. Know what you want. Think about the intended outcome of the email and outline it first in plain-spoken language. With practice, this outline will become your email and remember, if you need a reply from a particular person on a thread with multiple people, put their name in bold with action items and a timeline.

#6 Batch Tasks

As part of Elon Musk’s work ethic, he multi-tasks strategically. Whenever possible, he combines several tasks together in a productivity hack known as batching. For example, he answers emails while eating or having a meeting over lunch.

“BUT WHAT I FIND IS I’M ABLE TO BE WITH MY KIDS AND STILL BE ON EMAIL. I CAN BE WITH THEM AND STILL BE WORKING AT THE SAME TIME… IF I DIDN’T I WOULDN’T BE ABLE TO GET MY JOB DONE.”

How to apply this productivity secret: Studies have confirmed that multi-tasking is normally less efficient than single-tasking. The brain needs time to adjust when navigating different tasks also known as task switching. Switching making you tired and unproductive, not the tasks themselves. But if you batch similar tasks that call for similar mindsets, you can efficiently work on multiple tasks without losing your workflow. In other words, your brain is focused on one type of task at a time.

Here are a couple of examples:

• Outlining all your blog posts for the upcoming week in one sitting
• Processing all emails, slack, phone calls, and other communications at once.
• Updating several related worksheets at the same time.

To find more activities, you can write down all your general activities for the day or week and identify the ones that can be batched together. To process batches even faster, use the Pomodoro Technique.

#7 Scheduling

Running three companies is no small feat, which means time is of the essence for Elon Musk. He is constantly trying to optimize his time using feedback loops.

Like many other ultra-productive and successful people, a big part of Elon Musk’s work ethic is following a very detailed and specific daily schedule. He breaks his calendar into five minutes slots and by doing so he manages to get more tasks scheduled for his work.

How to apply this productivity secret: The most productive people work from their calendar instead of a to-do list. This is because calendars are finite and give you a better sense of time, making it easier to determine how much time you have to complete projects during your week. Breaking your days into small chunks and scheduling tasks on your calendar can boost your productivity.

But you don’t have to use five-minute chunks, another way could be to organize your work into 30 minutes slots, this may take some experimentation but over time you will find a timing that works best for you and your work – also make sure that you schedule everything, this includes checking email, calling clients, lunch, and meetings.

#8 Embrace Stretch Goals

Musk’s stretch goals have given us a world where one of the best cars you can buy is electric, and where we finally have reusable rockets. Musk uses stretch goals as a way to change perception. The first step is to establish that something is possible, then probability will occur.

Here’s a story from a former SpaceX executive:

“It’s like he has everyone working on this car that is meant to get from Los Angeles to New York on one tank of gas. They will work on the car for a year and test all of its parts. Then when they set off for New York after that year, all the vice presidents think privately that the car will be lucky to get to Las Vegas. What ends up happening is that the car gets to Mexico twice as far as they expected, and Elon is still mad, he gets twice as much as anyone else out of people.”

The last sentence illustrates the power of stretch goals. Even in the face of failure, your goal was so outrageous, so impossible to achieve, that you celebrate the small achievements you made because you expected that nothing would come out of it. The initial plan of Tesla was to start shipping the Roadster in 2006. The company pushed that deadline back several times until the car actually became available in 2008. Even though they released the car almost two years after the deadline, Tesla delivered the first completely battery-powered electric car.

How to apply this productivity secret: The intention of setting stretch goals is to push yourself outside of your comfort zone. Growth doesn’t happen when you keep doing what you’ve already done in the past, it comes from failing when trying to make progress. If you aim to achieve five great things and only succeed at two of them, you’re outperforming all the people who never tried in the first place.

Stretch goals demand more quantity and quality of work and force you to innovate more often than ordinary goals. And in the pursuit of it, you grow your skills to where they need to be in order to get it done. A question Tim Ferriss likes to ask himself that can fit nicely into stretch goals is “What would this look like if were easy?”.

At first, you won’t know how ambitious your stretch goals should be, but through using trial and error, you will understand how much past your limits you should push. The most important thing is to just start trying and then adjust as you go. The next time you’re making plans for work, take a few extra minutes to include a stretch goal – try to push yourself to perform 50% better than your normal goal requires. Go big and see if you can surprise yourself with incredible performance.

This strategy as a first step will be useful toward smashing goals and reaching targets you didn’t even think we’re possible. An example could be that you’re only capable of 10 pull-ups, but through giving yourself the stretch goal of 15, you pass the threshold of ten and feel the burn and eventually stop at 13. It may be two short of your stretch goal of 15 but it is three more reps than your original goal of 10!

#9 Develop a Growth Mindset

Elon Musk is never satisfied with where he is now. His companies have had enormous achievements, but Musk knows that there’s always room for improvement — in every area. There’s always a better, faster, or cheaper way to do things – in 2004, Musk called a supplier to get the price on an electromechanical actuator. The supplier quoted $120,000, with Elon resulting to first principles he broke down the components needed and asked Steve Davis, now a SpaceX director of advanced projects, to build one from scratch for under $5000. Davis spent nine months designing and building the actuator for $3900, which flew to space inside the Falcon 1 rocket.

“YOU SHOULD TAKE THE APPROACH THAT YOU’RE WRONG, YOUR GOAL IS TO BE LESS WRONG.”

This is what is called a growth mindset, an important skill that separates successful people from everyone else. If you would like to learn more about growth mindsets and how to obtain one, read ‘Mindset – Changing The Way You think To Fulfil Your Potential‘ by Dr Carol Dweck.

When you have a growth mindset, you know you can learn anything if you put enough effort into it, and if you fail, you approach the problem from a different angle until you find a solution that works – you iterate until you get it right.

In Musk’s own words:

“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”

The opposite is known as a fixed mindset, where the status quo is rarely challenged. Things will always be the way they are because “that’s how we do things around here”. Preconceived notions are taken as universal truths, instead of being questioned. Thus, people stagnate. On the other hand, developing a growth-oriented mindset brings progress to both our personal and professional lives and even if you manage small gains each day that are small, they compound over time.

How to apply this productivity secret: In order to succeed, you need to train the brain to look at failures and struggles as progress as getting closer to the solution. Growth comes from tackling difficult questions, problems, and challenges.

Here’s how you can start developing a growth mindset:

• Continue learning. Expand your knowledge with books, learn from your personal challenges and from others; loading your brain with fresh knowledge enables it to come up with new ideas and solutions that add value to your job and life.
• Be persistent. Shift your perspective to look at failures as minor setbacks and learning experiences in the great scheme of things, adapt and iterate your ideas so you can be successful on the next try.
• Live for challenges. If you have two choices, choose the harder one. Look at challenges as an opportunity to expand your skills and grow.
• Embrace failure. At some point in life, everybody fails; learn from failures by understanding what went wrong and how it can be improved, and use that experience in the next try.

#10 Develop a Wide Knowledge Base

According to his brother, Musk used to read two books a day at an early age. This led to a wide understanding of many sciences such as computer science, math, physics, and engineering. Read how Elon describes knowledge from his Reddit AMA:

“IT IS IMPORTANT TO VIEW KNOWLEDGE AS SORT OF A SEMANTIC TREE. MAKE SURE YOU UNDERSTAND THE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES, I.E THE TRUNK AND BIG BRANCHES, BEFORE YOU GET INTO LEAVES/DETAILS OR THERE IS NOTHING FOR THEM TO HANG ON TO.”

Even when running his companies Musk constantly tries to learn from the people around him that have more knowledge on a specific topic. He has been known to question his engineers about specific valves or materials to the point where his employees thought Elon was testing them, only to later realize he was asking questions for his own development.

Over the years, Musk developed T-shaped skills: a lot of knowledge in one particular field and a substantial amount of knowledge in many other disciplines & topics. This has allowed him to become world-class in one field, but also use his broad knowledge to innovate, find different solutions, collaborate, and be creative with experts in other fields effectively.

How to apply this productivity secret: Let’s take a practical example such as wanting to be healthy. To do so, playing or competing in one sport just isn’t going to cut it, whilst you may be an expert at football, if you’re not embracing the other skills you’re not going to cut it at a higher level. You need to learn the basics of a good diet, how to develop muscle, recovery, etc. While you have deep knowledge in a particular field, in this example football, you also develop broad knowledge in many other areas, which are the basis of being healthy.

This is a T shaped skills approach.

Want to know how to become T-shaped but not sure how to? Draw a T and list the main skills, secondary skills and basic knowledge in your area of expertise. If it helps, model a successful person in your field and their range of expertise, now see where you stand in each of those areas. Take steps to improve your deep expertise by reading books, taking courses, reading about your industry, and learning from other people whilst continually reevaluating yourself in these areas, adjusting your learning until you become T-shaped.

Finally, we leave you with one of our favorite Elon Musk quotes:

“I THINK IT IS POSSIBLE FOR ORDINARY PEOPLE TO CHOOSE TO BE EXTRAORDINARY.”