Earn Remarkable Success by Following the Best Productivity Tips from Elon Musk

Recently, I took the opportunity of reading Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. For Elon Musk, it has been an amazing roller-coaster ride of successes and setbacks. However, if there is one thing about the man that enables him to stand apart from the rest, it was his remarkable vision. The book has so many things to share but today I am going to share some productivity secrets which I found pretty interesting. He used them all to run multiple organizations. 

Best Productivity Tips from Elon Musk to Progress

Are you eager to understand what makes Elon Musk a smart man with a great drive and motivation? Here are some of the best productivity tips from Elon Musk which took him to a whole new level. 

Always Start Your Day with the Most Important Tasks

Elon Musk is a busy man because he’s working around the clock. He’s the CEO of three major organizations namely, Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink. Seems like Mr. Musk has a lot on his plate. 

On a daily basis, getting everything done can turn into a challenge. However, it is not that challenging for Mr. Musk because he starts his day by paying attention to the most important task first. 

And as Mr. Musk puts it, his important task is to respond back to all the emails which can remove roadblocks for other individuals who are working and making progress within his organizations. 

Elon Musk begins every day at 7 a.m. in the morning and every day he spends at least half an hour to respond back to the critical emails just waiting in his inbox for official approvals. His professional experience enables him to filter anything which is not considered critical and focus on what is critical. 

At a USC Commencement Speech, he said: 

“Focus on signal over noise. Don’t waste time on stuff that doesn’t actually make things better.”

Initiate a Feedback Loop to Give You a Complete Picture

Many leaders only want to focus on positive feedbacks and hear all the good stuff about their product or service but not Elon Musk. He takes into account all positive/negative feedbacks that involve him. 

If there is one thing that Elon Musk is always greatly suffering at; it is his ability to manage his time. Hence, he is always finding ways to optimize his time and fit in everything he needs to do on schedule. 

A guy who barely gets enough time to manage his own schedule can hardly get time to read anything. Yet, he profoundly manages his schedule and when asked, he shared his secret: 

“I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better. I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.”

Here’s what you can learn from the productivity guru himself! Gather your teams and ask them to give you honest feedback on a particular product or service. Ask them to gather those feedbacks from their clients, family members, other colleagues in the market and so forth. Say it out loud to them: 

“Don’t tell me what you like, tell me what you don’t like.”

Although the negative feedbacks coming your way might hurt your sentiments, but you’ve to listen. Change your perception and understand that they are only trying to point out what they feel is wrong. 

Have You Heard About Asynchronous Communication? 

Elon Musk is a great personality and what makes him more exceptional is his ability to communicate asynchronously with his teams. When asked, Musk admitted that he finds asynchronous means of communication more effective which is to communicate with people through texts and emails.

He stated in one of his conversations, 

“I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I’m really good at email.” 

Also, he has made himself unavailable to the outside world by using a hidden email ID. 

He has done this in order to focus on his tasks at hand and do some actual work with his company. 

If you want to adopt a similar lifestyle as that of Elon Musk, you need to do the following 3 things. 

• Turn off notifications: shut all notifications down on your phone, computer, and any other gadgets you use. If it’s truly important, people will call
• Decline meetings: don’t agree to a meeting unless there is a clear agenda and you know the expected outcome; if possible, use email instead
• Work remotely: a noisy office means distractions, whereas working from home is done in silence. If that’s not a possibility, ask for a private office

Strategically Multi-Task to Fit More In Less Time

What makes Musk stand apart from the rest of the crowd is his ability to think strategically. He combines several important tasks together in his own format of productivity hack called batching. 

The best example is that he often responds to important emails while he’s having lunch. 

In fact, he explains it better in one of his quotes; 

“But what I find is I’m able to be with [my kids] 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.”

It is also identified that multitasking is not an efficient way of progress. Usually, when someone is multi-tasking, it happens to be that he or she is switching through various tasks and that is something which makes achieving the objective more energy draining. However, if you batch together with similar tasks and achieve them all at a similar instance, it becomes a whole lot easier for you to focus. 

As a writer, I believe I can batch together with similar tasks such as, 

• Creating an outline for all my blog posts for the upcoming week in a single sitting. 
• Check up my emails, slack messages, phone calls, and other messages. 
• Updating different sheets for various tasks at a similar instance. 

It allows me to better manage my tasks proficiently and achieve more in all of my day’s work. 

So there you go, here are some really important lessons which I believe can have a positive impact on your productivity. Elon Musk is truly an emblem in the world of technological advancement. If, you or I, can learn a few things from Elon! Wouldn’t that be simply amazing for us to polish up on productivity? 

Article Credit: I took the inspiration for this article from Dan Silvestre’s work.