If you were Elon Musk, you’d have each week to manage two multibillion-dollar companies, three smaller, dream about Mars, make time to see five of his sons, and if lucky — to have a romantic dinner. As Elon Musk spends his working week? The schedule of the General Director of SpaceX and Tesla has been the subject of wonder for many years. How could one person manage to launch and maintain so many companies planning to retire on Mars and praising the game Overwatch on Twitter?
Work, work, work and enough sleep
It is not surprising that the head of Tesla and SpaceX spends most of his time running their companies. It was reported that Musk has reduced its working week with a grueling 100 hours to 80-90 hours a week. To maintain such a working rhythm, he sat tight on caffeine. At the peak of activity of Musk drank eight cans of diet coke and several large cups of coffee a day. “I was so worried that he began to feel that I was losing peripheral vision,” he says. “But now the office has a diet coke without caffeine”.
From sleep, however, he did not refuse. Musk has discovered that reducing the time allotted for sleep has a bad effect on how much he was able to do for the day. Instead of nodding off, Musk has taken the habit to get up around seven in the morning and go to bed after midnight. “Best for me — 6, 6.5 hours of sleep,” he said in 2013. “Sleep is very good. I found that if not enough sleep, I’m pretty gloomy”.
On average, the Musk is working twice the hours than the average person. In the US, for example, a typical 25-54-year-old employee working an average of 6.3 hours per day. Musk also works 12 hours a day. It works with email, even when spending time with children.
Not to be late for five works
In June, Musk said that he shared most of their working hours (not less than 90%) between its two largest companies, Tesla and SpaceX. Three other initiatives in which it acts as the co-founder, investor, Executive Director, consume the rest of the time. In 2013, musk described the busy schedule at SpaceX in Los Angeles on Monday, then a flight to the Bay Area Tuesday night to begin the work of Tesla on Wednesday and Thursday, and on Friday to return to SpaceX. Weekends, too, for SpaceX (and a few Tesla). On 6 June he said that he had spent a little more time in the Tesla, which is “pull the drama”.
Family time
It is unclear how much time Musk spends at home, but five of his sons reportedly spend about four days in every fortnight with his father. The boys regularly visited the California factory, the Mask, and sends him to the annual camping. “I am quite a good father,” says Musk. “I’m with the guys a lot of time. And also take them with me when I go out of the city.”
A little less Musk likes to tell about the time he devotes to romantic interests. After the first divorce, with Justine Musk in 2008 and a breakup with his second wife, actress Talulah Riley (the first time), he mentioned the plan “10-hour”.
“I think the time on business and children are marked correctly,” said Musk. “But I would like to devote more time to Dating. I need to find a girl. So I will take some more time. How much a woman needs a week? Five to ten hours? More? I don’t know.” He and Riley got together and got married in 2013, but broke up again. Now Musk has spent probably more time with amber heard. But with her, as it turned out, he was constantly at odds and disconnected.
Case time fun hour
Musk, who once spent “10 hours a day” reading books, able to relax now. Video games are a frequent topic in his Twitter feed. “I like to listen to music in the car,” he says, trying to think of other entertainment. “I watch movies, although less these days. Communicate with children, seeing friends, the usual. Sometimes a riot on Twitter. But I usually just working.”
There’s another secret.
A little red wine, vintage record, some Ambien … and magic!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 7, 2017
“A little red wine, vintage music, zolpidem [ambien]… magical!”
The formula for success
Self-discipline and workflow Elon musk is reduced to a formula of five variables. Or permanent — here’s how to watch. For the most part his recipe of success is very difficult and is not suitable for everyone, but if you undertake to walk in the footsteps of the Mask to something you will. The formula sounds simple — work 14-16 hours a day. But in fact it is a complicated formula.
Below are the barriers that you may encounter trying to follow this formula.
The first barrier: biological
Pain from work during the greater part of the day increases with time nonlinearly. It is growing exponentially. Elon Musk himself admits it, but continues to work at the same pace. For the average person it’s not impossible, but extremely difficult. You don’t just test your physical ability but also mental ability, emotional ability to cope with stress during those long hours that you separate yourself from friends and family. In the world of startups there is a saying: “I Want to run a successful startup? Work, Sleep, Family, Sports or Friends — choose any three.”
Biologically it is possible. For example, think about the time you spend with your friends. You can stay awake for many hours, without feeling bad. Of course, gradually comes fatigue, but you can easily overcome. The reason is not that this activity requires physical or mental work. The reason is that you “like” to do it. The reason you don’t want to work 16 hours a day that you just do not like their work.
Elon loves his job and is willing to share its methods:
- Practice management cortisol. When you are with friends, your body gets a rush of serotonin. When you’re at work, your body gets a rush of cortisol. To adapt biologically to a 16-hour working day, you need to control the emissions of cortisol.
- The search for solutions. There is a difficult but possible way to do it. Regardless of the situation, you need to look at it from the point of view of engineering problems and make engineering decision.
If you were to solve the problem at any time or for hours, in the latter case, you would have experienced stress may seriously panicked.
- Weigh each task: learn the most effectively cope with stress. For this “weigh each task”. Think about a simple situation: you leave home, to fly, and get stuck in traffic. You are getting seriously nervous. If you weighed the task and, say, tried to take into account the traffic and the weather, knowing that the road from home to the airport takes 35 minutes, you just went for 55 minutes and just in time.
- Don’t be nervous: the most effective people are not nervous, when faced with a problem. They just quickly identificeret, find a good solution and working on it. Their stress level remains low, and therefore this method becomes a habit.
- Don’t be nervous others. When one person begins to panic, with him starting, and others. It is important to approach stressful situations with a cool head. If the football team is well coordinated, keeping a cool temperament, she can win a match in the minority. But if one player is demoralizing the whole team, defeat is inevitable.
The best players from the best teams keep composure and not allow others to lose it.
Simple answer: weigh. Don’t panic. Practice. Don’t be nervous.
How many hours Elon Musk spends at work in their businesses
The second barrier: ergonomics
Obviously, when you work 16 hours a day are bound to happen failures in safety and ergonomics. Elon does not disclose their methods on this issue, but it is clear that he has any.
- Take enough breaks, drink enough water, eat balanced and don’t eat all that arm will fall.
- Sleep at least 7 hours a day (he Ilon sleeping for 6, a 6.5, but would like more), leave for 15-30 minutes on a charge.
- Make ergonomic action. Marathons don’t run with the wrong shoes or the wrong step. First, fix them, and then plan your move.
Simple answer: stay in shape, relax, exercise.
The third barrier: psychological
This barrier simply means that if you run into situations when you have to do what you don’t like the work will become very difficult. Perhaps to circumvent this barrier, there is no possibility, but a systematic approach will help to solve problems in a timely manner.
Ilona formula is simple: love your work. If you’re constantly on pins and needles and problems to no end, then something is wrong and needs to change.
- Make your work pleasant: if the work was pleasant, it could be run indefinitely. Any of us could spend hours doing what he likes to play the piano, draw, go shopping and so on.
- Automate: to work became more fun, do the least favorite tasks are simple to perform and simplify them for you did them a computer program.
- Train and delegate: often tasks accumulate, but some handle them better, so in the group there is always someone who will take on your troubles. Divide tasks and share responsibilities, fun and useful.
- You are your own Savior: your supervisor will not do the job for you. Yes, he can and he will if you want, but in the end you decide its a problem and needs to handle them independently.
Simple answer: love your work and do it better for yourself.
Fourth barrier: boredom
Regardless of what you do and how you like it, if you are only serious problems, they must get bored in the long run. You have to constantly work on to improve their work.
Formula Ilona: always separate the signal from noise.
Signal and noise: when you are working on the signal, i.e. on the problem, which entails other problems, there will always be other problems to solve that you will wish for more. While you are interested in solving problems, you will never get bored and will work on them non-stop.
A simple example: customers come into my shop and I give them to fill out a form. Because they need constant help, have to work to keep up with them. Can I create an electronic form, so when they booked a meeting with me, they filled out this form? If the answer is Yes, it will work on the signal. And as every customer populates each item one by one, it will work on the noise. Very soon customers learn to fill out a form and will fill it with all accurate and you have less and less to work over the noise.
Simple answer: focus on the signal, get rid of the noise.
Fifth barrier: behold the root
It often happens that the most interesting problems to solve — not just those that require scientific thinking. They are also the most difficult to solve. But those people who have a lot of patience to solve them, insight and time to solve them, usually study and understand the physics.
Formula Ilona: building big structures need to come from the very deep and simple physical concepts.
People often think in analogies and try to build a solution which would be similar to existing solutions to other problems. If you start from the basics, you can come to the best solution. If you start from the basics, to experiment with deep and study more and more failures will, of course, but every failure will bring new experience and will help arrive at the best solution.
The reality is that most people do not usually dive deep into the leadership and to face challenges. The wise do not just go into the manuals, they write them. They determine how to solve problems and how to do it better. So they become like Elon Musk.
Simple answer: always learning, ask deep questions and hard work on finding the right solutions.
The secrets of a workaholic: how does Elon Musk?
Ilya Hel