5-minute placements for each task

• He works excessive hours and divides his time into five-minute segments to get things done.
• I tested his system to stay on top of my workload. It worked – but was boringly adamant.

It’s not easy to run a business, let alone three. Elon Musk is the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and brainchip company Neuralink, as well as the founder of The Boring Company.

Musk goes to great lengths to stay on top of everything. He would work 80 to 100 hours a week and sleep six hours. He emails at meetings and when spending time with his sons, he said.

Musk is known to be scrupulous with his time, dividing his days into five-minute increments in order to prioritize workloads between his businesses. He often forgoes breakfast, swallows his lunch in five minutes and avoids phone calls.

Putting Eric Schmidt’s messaging technique to the test helped me manage my inbox. I thought Musk’s time management hack might have the same effect on my ability to organize my time, so I put it to the test for a few days.

However, I didn’t go all-in on Musk – I bent the rules not to skip breakfast or go through 16-hour days (which is arguably counterproductive for most people). Instead, I applied the five-minute slots to my usual 8am to 5pm times.

It took a little planning

Blocking out time spent on specific tasks is a technique that many productivity gurus swear by. But Musk’s is planning on steroids and it took a lot of preparation.

It’s almost impossible to do anything right in five minutes other than a source email or a social media post. Musk once told Y-Combinator that he spends 80% of his time on engineering and design, so it’s unlikely he’ll limit himself to getting things done in five minutes either.

I still organized the days into five-minute slots, but for the most part, I grouped my slots. I spent 12 five-minute slots in a row writing an interview on Wednesdays at 9 a.m., for example. I also made time for breaks and administrative tasks.

Finally, I set aside time – six five-minute slots – at the end of the day to complete important but non-essential tasks like reading an article I came across that day.

I was organized and I did a lot more

Hannibal Hanschke-Pool / Getty Images

I have a habit of making tasks longer than they should be – by rewriting sentences over and over, for example. Limiting the time I had for a specific task meant I got it done faster. Knowing that I only had an hour to do it really focused my mind.

It has also helped me eliminate unnecessary distractions that can hamper productivity, like regularly checking my inbox or scrolling through social media.

But it required constant adjustment – which was annoying

Sometimes you can’t control when a business responds to a request for comment, or when a coworker comes to you with an unexpected task. In some cases, I also realized that I had been too ambitious when planning how quickly I could complete certain tasks.

This meant that I had to constantly rethink my schedule, pushing things back or the next day as tasks crept into the time I had planned for others.

It probably gets easier as you start to understand that things take time, but it was initially frustrating. I also started to leave a blank space in my calendar to allow more flexibility.

There are some parts that I’m going to stick with

All in all, as the daily routine grows, Musk is probably overkill for most workers.

But I will continue with some parts. Scheduling dedicated time, even for the smallest tasks, helped me accomplish them and made me feel more organized at the end of the day.