A Work Day In the Life of Elon Musk: Now You Know Why He Is So Successful
Over the past two decades, Elon Musk has emerged to be one of the most successful and inspiring entrepreneurs in the world. Elon designs his day to use each minute of his work day with the highest efficiency. This article is put together by watching many of his interviews and putting the pieces together to estimate what a work day in Elon Musk’s life looks like.
Early Bird
Musk starts off his day at the same time everyday at about 7 a.m. He attempts to get an average of 6–6.5 hours of sleep on a daily basis. He spends first 30 minutes of this day attending to critical emails. He has expressed on reddit that taking a warm shower everyday brings the most amount of positive impact to his day than any of his other habits. Although he considers having a good breakfast every day a good idea, he usually ends up skipping breakfast to save time and settling for coffee sometimes; he spends his time on some more emails.
School Run
Finding the current private education system ineffictive, he created an exclusive school for gifted students within the SpaceX campus for his kids to attend. This school focuses mostly on the core STEM subjects. This school ensures that students are working with the most current technology and being taught the most relavent topics such Artificial inteligence. Kids’ school being on one of his primary work compuses makes school runs a breeze for Elon Musk.
In multiple interviews, Elon has emphasized the importance of working hard in order to be successful; Working 40 hours a week is not going to cut it if you want to be successful. Musk is known to work anywhere from 80 to 100 hours per week. Although we might think majority of his time might be spend promoting his companies and doing media interview, he actually spends 80% percent of his time on engineering and design tasks. He divides majority of his time between SpaceX and Tesla. He spends Monday and Fridays on SpaceX. Elon Musk’s Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are spent in Tesla. He works for his other companies (OpenAI, NeuroLink, The Boring Company) on Saturdays or remotely. He mostly spends his sundays with his children or traveling.
In a 2013 interview he mentioned, “What I find is I’m able to be with them 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.”
5 Minutes Slots
Elon Musk has many small rules that boost his productivity throughout the day.
He breaks down his day into 5 minutes slots. Although this might not seem like enough time to accomplish anything, he believes it’s surprising how much you can get done in just 5 minutes if you give you utmost attention to the task at hand. This time slot also applies to his lunch; He lunch is brought to him during meeting or he takes 5 minutes to consume anything he can get his hands on.
Elon insists on meetings containing of the essential personnel only. He tends to avoid having big meetings. His rule is, “if you are not adding any value to the meeting, leave.” It is not meant to be rude; it is a way of respecting his employees’ time, so they can spend their time more productively. Elon has a lot of respect and value for his time, thus he believes in reserving his time for high priority issues and reducing the frequency of meetings ones issues are resolved.
Multi-Tasking
Elon Musk multi tasks when and where he can; he referes to it as “batching.” He works on his phone while in meetings. He even checks and responds to emails during his bathroom breaks. As mentioned before, he even wolfs down his day meals while working within 5 minutes.
After Work
Even after work, there is no relaxing for Elon Musk. He spends his after work hours on catching up on reading, going to the gym or attending work dinners. Some of Elon’s favorite titles are “The Lord of the Rings”, “Twelve Against the Gods,” and biographies of Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin. Musk stays in shape by hitting the gym a couple of times a week.
As Elon told Auto BIld, “Business dinners are probably where I eat way too much.”
Elon says working hard throughout the work days helps him be more relaxed during the weekends. He usually hits the hay at around 1 a.m.
These hectic work hours shouldn’t be surprising to any of us as we look at how much he has accomplished and how much more he intends on accomplishing.
