Top 10 Elon Musk Productivity Secrets For Insane Success

Top 10 Elon Musk Productivity Secrets For Insane Success
I read Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future over the summer. It’s a fantastic read and a detailed account of the ups and downs of one of the biggest visionaries of our time.

It also gives you a sneak peek into Musk’s work ethic and productivity secrets he uses to run multiple companies.

Now, Elon Musk is a smarter than average individual and has enormous ambition and drive. But I think that us–mere mortals–can incorporate some of his productivity secrets into our daily lives.

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

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 7 a.m. and replies to critical emails for at least half an hour. Musk is careful to filter anything that is not deemed critical, focusing on only the most 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.”

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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:

My most important task is writing awesome content. That’s why I always start the day by sitting down and writing. I won’t move on to the next task before writing at least 1000 words.

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.

Musk has a very tight schedule, often working at different locations on any given day. That’s why he’s constantly trying to optimize his time.

While admitting he hadn’t read any books on time management, Musk shared 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. I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.”

Musk incorporates 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 of it.

He also focuses on hiring the best people in any field that can provide consistent and truthful feedback.

Shortening the feedback loops lead to increased efficiency, faster implementation, and a better-finished product.

Apply This Productivity Secret
The great thing about this particular Elon Musk productivity secret is that it works for both your professional and personal life.

Gather your team and solicit feedback about a particular product, feature, management style, business process, or anything that you are currently trying to improve.

> “Don’t tell me what you like, tell me what you don’t like.”

You can do the same exercise with friends. And while the negative feedback may be wrong, you know they are simply trying to help you and it’s well-intentioned.

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 what people have done in the past. It’s harder to think that way, though.”

Here’s an example of first principles reasoning, from 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 two percent 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 in his own company.

And SpaceX was born.

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. You have to break down the problem 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. Is Musk’s words: “Boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say ‘okay, what are we sure is true’…and then reason up from there.”
3. Create new solutions: if you deconstructed the problem following the first two steps, you are now ready to create new solutions from scratch

If you want a deeper look into Musk’s mind and reasoning by first principles, read one of my all-time favorite articles: The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Sauce.

The first productivity hack gave you a slight hint for this one: Musk prefers to communicate on his own terms. That means defaulting to email and texts, both asynchronous ways of communication.

In his own words:

> “I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I’m really good at email.”

He also makes himself hard to reach for people outside his company by using an obscure email address.

This lets him focus on actual work for his companies.

Apply This Productivity Secret
Progress comes from being focused and performing Deep Work. This means living as asynchronously as possible and with minimal interruptions from coworkers.

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

* Turn off notifications: shut all notifications down on your phone, computer, and any other gadgets you use. If it’s truly important, people will call
* 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
* Work remotely: a noisy office means distractions, whereas working from home is done in silence. If that’s not a possibility, ask for a private office

Minimize distractions in your daily life in order to make progress in meaningful work.

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”.

He is extremely clear, concise, and direct on his emails. As an example, read the email sent to his entire staff about the use of acronyms aptly called “Acronyms Seriously Suck”.

He frequently emails his entire company with updates, how to communicate, company visions and mission, and being more productive at work.

> “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 enjoy working.”

He is also a master at public speaking, converting complex concepts into easy to understand language using an authentic voice. Musk often uses the present tense when talking about visionary topics, a language trick that excites the listener into feeling the future is now.

Apply This Productivity Secret
According to a study of 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.

You want to be succinct but also get your message across. In an email, every word counts. Here are some tips on how to master communication over email:

* Keep it short: don’t write ten sentences when two suffice. To practice, take an email you’ve already written in a normal fashion and edit it down to half the words
* Avoid squishy words: avoid writing “I feel”, “I’m not sure”, “perhaps”, using the passive voice, or any adverbs that waste time for both you and your recipient and create confusion and misunderstandings
* Know what you want: think about the intended outcome of the email and outline it first in plain-spoken language. With practice, this outline IS your email
* Bold the important: if you need a reply from a particular person on a thread with multiple people, put their name in bold with action items and timeline
* Forwarding code of conduct: never forward along a massive email chain without a few bullet points as a quick summary at the top explaining why you’re sending it and action items you need from the other person

Musk 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.

Here’s a quote from Elon on the subject:

> “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.”

Another example is going through emails and invoices while on phone meetings or interviews.

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 makes 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 stack, write down all your general activities for the day and week and identify the ones that can be batched together. Try the batch a couple of times and rearrange tasks if necessary.

To process batches even faster, use the Pomodoro Technique.

Running three companies is no small feat, whic