How does Elon Musk manage his time?

Elon Musk's time management technique can help serial entrepreneurs to run multiple businesses.

If you have been living under a rock and don’t know who Elon Musk is, he is the poster boy for serial entrepreneurship. The CEO and founder of many great companies including SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company, Neuralink, OpenAI; and more recently Twitter, to name a few. But how exactly does the world’s richest man manage his time to make sure all businesses succeed? Well listen to this episode of the Startup Stream Serial Entrepreneur Podcast to find out…

Let’s begin…

Elon Musk sleeps 6 hours a day

During an interview with the Full Send Podcast recently, Elon claimed that he is quite nocturnal, sleeping at around 3am each night, and waking up at around 9-9.30; a mere 6 hours later.

Although this does give Elon 18 hours to be productive each day, as opposed to the 16-17 hours a day the average adult does, this equates to an extra 30 days of being awake per year than the average adult. That is a lot, and is bound to help productivity, right?

Well according to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, the adult needs more than 7 hours of sleep per night for normal function.

In contrast, the world’s second richest man and Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, reportedly sleeps 8-9 hours a night. Quite a contrast.

I know from talking to my own team here at Startup Streams, that there are nigh owls, like myself, and early birds, like our web developer, who is most productive early morning. The advice here is to do whatever works well for you. You will know how much sleep you need to function optimally and just because a certain Musk sleeps only 6 hours a day, doesn’t mean that you should too.

Elon Musk's 5 minute rule

Now, you may have heard our a previous podcast “How to find time to start your next business” that Elon Musk splits his daily time schedule into only 5 minute increments. Wow.

Each 5 minute time slot is designed to achieve a very deliberate task. From the moment Elon awakes, to the moment he sleeps at 3am, every minute of the day is accounted for. Time blocking like this means that there is no excuse to get things done; especially when you manage multiple billion dollar businesses and there is a ton which needs your attention. It also doesn’t give you a chance to get distracted and keeps any meetings or period of collaboration efficient and to the point. Less chit chat, more doing.

Supposedly, Elon utilises his own 5 minute rule in the following way: 1. Elon lists everyone he needs to do the next day, 2. He’s estimates the time it will take to do each task - which I am sure is easier said than done. And 3. He does include some buffer time around tasks he believes may take a while longer, but wants to apply a smaller amount of time to try to get the task done as quickly as possible. The buffer is there just in case. If you try Elon’s five minute time management plan, you get bonus points if you are able to break big hour long jobs into 5 minute tasks and sub-tasks.

Carrying on…