The top 10 productivity secrets of Elon Musk and how you can apply them to your daily life. You have 1 free member-only story left this month. Click here to get it.Elon Musk is a smarter than average individual and has enormous ambition and drive. But us-mere mortals can incorporate some of his productivity secrets into our daily lives
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First principles is about getting to the root cause of the problem by breaking down the problem into its basic elements
- Three main steps to apply this thinking framework
- Identify and define current assumptions
- Break it down into the fundamental principles
- Create new solutions
- The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Sauce
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Gather your team and solicit feedback about a particular product, feature, management style, business process, or anything that you are currently trying to improve
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.
- Look at the fundamentals and construct your reasoning from that and then see if you have a conclusion that works or doesn’t work.
Embrace 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.
- Setting goals that maintain the status quo doesn’t get you reusable rockets.
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The most productive people work from their calendar instead of a to-do list
- 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
- Break your days into small chunks and schedule tasks on your calendar
Use Asynchronous Communication
Musk prefers to communicate on his own terms
Develop a Wide Knowledge Base
Read 2 books a day
- Try to learn from people around you that have more knowledge
- Develop T-shaped skills
- Knowledge in one field and substantial amount of knowledge in many other disciplines
- Use broad knowledge to innovate and find different solutions
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Deep Work: live as asynchronously as possible and with minimal interruptions
- Three solutions to start working on your terms
- Turn off notifications
- Decline meetings
- Work remotely
- Minimize distractions in your daily life
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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
- Use the 80/20 rule to help you figure it out and get in the habit of doing it before moving to anything else
Bonus: Showering
Your brain has been working all night for you, trying to come up with solutions in the background.
- A shower provides you with quiet time to think right after refreshing your brain
- Use it to plan the day ahead or think about solutions for problems you might face.
Start the Day with Critical Work
Elon Musk starts his day with his most critical work
- This means dealing with important emails that he needs to address in order to unblock other people’s work and progress.
- Filter anything that is not deemed critical, focusing on only the most important items.
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Growth doesn’t happen when you keep doing what you’ve already done in the past
- It comes from failing while trying to make progress
- Stretch goals demand more quantity and quality of work and force you to innovate more often than ordinary goals
- At first, you won’t know how ambitious your stretch goals should be
- Start trying and then adjust as you go
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Continual learning: expand your knowledge with books, learn from your personal challenges, and from others
- Be persistent: shift your perspective to look at failures as minor setbacks and learning experiences in the great scheme of things
- Live for challenges: if you have two choices, choose the harder; look at challenges as an opportunity to expand your skills and grow
- Embrace failure: learn from failures by understanding what went wrong and how it can be improved and use that experience in the next try
- Open to feedback: effective and timely feedback on areas to improve is a critical component of success; be more open to receiving feedback, even the non-constructive one
- Celebrate others: don’t let others’ successes dampen your own successes because they won’t dampen yours
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In an email, every word counts
- Keep it short
- Avoid squishy words
- Know what you want
- Bold the important
- Forwarding code of conduct
- Never forward along a massive email chain without a few bullet points explaining why you’re sending it
Batch Tasks
Whenever possible, Musk combines several tasks together in a productivity hack known as batching
- For example, he answers emails while eating or having a meeting over lunch.
- Another example is going through emails and invoices while on phone meetings or interviews.
Use Feedback Loops
Think about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better.
- Seek negative feedback, preferably negative feedback
- Hire the best people in any field that can provide consistent and truthful feedback. Shortening the feedback loops lead to increased efficiency and faster implementation.
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T-Shaped Skills
- Draw a T and list the main skills, secondary skills, and base knowledge
- Now see where you stand in each of those areas
- Improve your deep expertise by reading books, taking courses, reading about your industry, and learning from other people
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If you batch similar tasks that call for similar mindsets you can efficiently work on multiple tasks without losing your workflow
- Example: 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
Scheduling
He prioritizes engineering, design, and manufacturing, spending 80% of his time on those areas.
- By splitting his day into 5-minute chunks, he manages to get more tasks scheduled into his work, resulting in more time for other important tasks.
Develop a Growth Mindset
When you have a growth mindset, you know you can learn anything if you put enough effort into it.
- Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
- Developing a growth-oriented mindset brings progress to both our personal and professional lives.
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 is extremely clear, concise, and direct on his emails. He frequently emails his entire company with updates on updates, how to communicate, visions and missions, and being more productive at work.
