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