“Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.”
Paul Gauguin
24 hours are the only time available to everyone of us on earth.
While most people complain they don’t have time to accomplish meaningful things that they desire, few elite professionals tend to achieve remarkable things in the same time span.
So, how can we put ourselves among the latter group?
Please read on if you care for an answer to this important question.
To begin, the case-study person of this article is none other than the iron man in world of innovation, science, technology and productivity: Elon Musk.
Arguably, the most resourceful human alive today.
He is a super-productive thinker who is founding and running multiple revolutionary companies to the amazement of both his friends and his foes.
He is the CEO of space exploration company SpaceX, which has a firmly stated mission of taking humans to Mars among other fantastic places in the solar system.
And the nascent electric car company he cofounded; Tesla Motors is now recognized to be more valuable than the great Toyota motors. Incredible!
And these are not all. Musk currently plays major roles in a number of other huge projects across many sectors to solve interesting problems for the society in which he lives.
With all these in his plate, he is still responsible as a father to five healthy children.
So, I dare to ask myself: how does Musk manage his limited time to accomplish so much when most of us are struggling to run a single company, manage our immediate family or even just to handle our jobs?
If your favorite excuse for making great things happen in your domain has always been ‘I don’t have enough time’ read the following words from the author of ‘Life’s Little Instruction Book,’ H. Jackson Brown, to rethink:
“Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.”
Though there are many strategies of effectiveness to learn from Musk, the one we shall focus on today is called timeboxing.
Timeboxing concept is all about allocating a fixed amount of time to an activity in advance and then resolve to complete that activity within that time frame.
Note: many people can say they want to do this but to Musk, it is more than just an intention. It is something he takes very seriously; it is his living philosophy.
Therefore, Musk decides to apportion his entire daily schedule into 5-minute blocks of focused time on many activities throughout his day—one thing at a time.
This enables him to give his undivided attention to one thing at time in a very short span of time, which allows for huge productivity gains due to his uncanny level of concentration on the task at hand.
By focusing on one thing at a time, he avoids the possibility of losing precious time which normally accompanies frequent task switching or multi-tasking that some of us still practice.
Furthermore, small measures of progress help him to maintain momentum throughout the periods of each day. The faster he completed a productive task, the more quickly he develops an attitude of great productivity and high effectiveness.
In essence, Musk has won over the inertia of procrastination and distraction by optimizing for starting through a short window of opportunity for intense concentration and completion of one task after another.
As we can see from the example of Elon Musk, there is a huge power in short blocks of focused time, when one is disciplined enough to stick to the schedule, every single day.
