Elon Musk on Productivity: 6 Rules He Uses to Get More Done

Elon Musk has never been known for having a relaxed relationship with work.

The billionaire has built his reputation around ambitious deadlines, multiple companies and a willingness to spend extraordinary amounts of time solving difficult problems. But when Musk talks about productivity, his advice is not simply to work longer. Some of his most practical lessons are surprisingly basic: stop wasting time in meetings, communicate with the person who can solve the problem, remove unnecessary rules and make sure everyone understands what they are actually trying to accomplish.

In 2018, Musk sent Tesla employees a memo outlining several recommendations for improving productivity. The email became widely discussed because it challenged some of the habits that become almost impossible to remove once a company gets large. His message was blunt: if a meeting is not useful, don’t have it. If communication is being slowed down by hierarchy, remove the obstacle. If a company rule makes no sense, question the rule.

Those ideas are still relevant far beyond Tesla.

In fact, for anyone trying to understand Elon Musk’s productivity tips, the interesting part is not how many hours he works. It is how aggressively he tries to eliminate work that does not need to be done in the first place.

1. Stop Filling the Calendar with Meetings

Musk’s first productivity rule is one that most employees would probably appreciate immediately: get rid of unnecessary meetings.

In his Tesla memo, Musk described excessive meetings as a major problem in large companies. He recommended eliminating large meetings unless they were genuinely useful to everyone involved, and keeping necessary meetings short.

The thinking behind it is simple.

A one-hour meeting with 10 people is not one hour of company time. It is ten hours.

And if those ten people spend the meeting repeating information that could have been sent in an email, checking on work that has already been completed or discussing an issue that does not require a group decision, the cost becomes even harder to justify.

This is one of the most useful parts of Elon Musk on productivity because it changes the question.

Instead of asking, “Should we have a meeting?”

Ask, “What can only be accomplished by having this meeting?”

If the answer is unclear, there may be a better way to handle it.

2. Leave the Meeting When You Are No Longer Useful

Musk’s advice gets even more direct here.

He told Tesla employees that if they realize they are not adding value to a meeting or call, they should leave. He argued that staying simply because you were invited wastes time.

That sounds almost rude in a traditional workplace.

It can also be incredibly practical.

Think about how often people remain in meetings because they feel uncomfortable leaving. Someone from finance joins a product discussion even though their part was finished 20 minutes earlier. A senior manager stays because everyone assumes they should be there. A junior employee says nothing because they were invited “for visibility.”

Nobody wants to be the first person to leave.

So, everyone stays.

Musk’s point is that productivity sometimes requires breaking that social habit.

The better approach is not necessarily to literally walk out of every meeting. It is to make participation purposeful. If someone is not needed for the discussion, they should not have to sacrifice an hour simply to prove they are engaged.

3. Don’t Let the Chain of Command Slow Down the Work

One of Musk’s more controversial ideas about productivity is also one of his most interesting.

He has argued that communication should take the shortest practical route between the people who need to exchange information. In his Tesla memo, he specifically criticized situations where employees have to move information through several layers of management simply because that is how the organizational chart is structured.

Anyone who has worked in a large organization will recognize the problem.

An engineer notices an issue.
The engineer tells the manager.
The manager tells the director.
The director tells the vice president.
The vice president asks the director for more information.
The director asks the manager.

And by the time the original engineer gets an answer, the problem that needed attention on Monday is still sitting there on Thursday.

Hierarchy has its place. Someone needs to be accountable for decisions, budgets and people.

But hierarchy does not need to become a communication obstacle.

For Musk, productivity means information getting to the person who can act on it as quickly as possible.

That principle can apply to almost any business.

4. Say What You Mean

Musk has also taken aim at something that rarely appears on a traditional productivity checklist: corporate jargon.

In his Tesla memo, he told employees to avoid acronyms and unnecessary terminology for products, software and processes. His reasoning was that anything requiring an explanation makes communication harder.

This sounds like a small point. It isn’t.

Every unnecessary word creates another opportunity for misunderstanding.

Consider the difference between: “We need to leverage a cross-functional optimization strategy.”

and: “We need the engineering and sales teams to fix the process.”

The second sentence is easier to understand. More importantly, people know what it asks them to do.

Clear communication is a productivity tool.

A team that understands a problem quickly can start solving it. A team that spends twenty minutes trying to decode what someone meant is already losing time.

This is one reason Elon Musk’s productivity advice often comes back to simplicity. The goal is not to sound impressive. The goal is to get the work done.

5. Question Rules That No Longer Make Sense

Companies need rules. Without them, large organizations can quickly become chaotic.

But rules have a tendency to outlive the circumstances that created them.

A process might have made perfect sense when a company had 20 employees. Five years later, the organization has 2,000 people, the technology has changed and the market looks completely different, yet the same approval process remains.

Musk’s advice is to use common sense when a company rule becomes obviously counterproductive. His Tesla memo specifically argued that rules should not be followed blindly when they stand in the way of getting the job done.

This is where his approach becomes more interesting than a standard “work harder” productivity philosophy.

Musk is essentially asking employees to challenge the system itself.

If something takes five steps when it could take two, ask why.

If a report exists only because someone once requested it, ask whether anyone still uses it.

If an approval adds no meaningful oversight, ask what purpose it serves.

Sometimes the fastest way to improve productivity is not to make people work faster.

It is to stop making them do unnecessary work.

6. Solve Problems from the Basics

There is another Elon Musk principle that sits underneath much of his approach to work: first-principles thinking.

Rather than accepting that something must be done a certain way because that is how an industry has always done it, Musk has repeatedly advocated breaking a problem down to its fundamental facts and working upward from there. His approach to engineering and business decisions has been closely associated with this method.

It is a useful productivity habit because assumptions can be expensive.

Imagine a company has a production process that takes three weeks.

A conventional approach might ask: “How can we make this three-week process faster?”

A first-principles approach asks: “Why does this process take three weeks in the first place?”

That is a very different question.

Maybe one part takes two days. Another takes three. The remaining two weeks exist because several departments are waiting for approvals from one another.

Now the solution is not to make every employee work harder.

It is to remove the bottleneck.

That is the deeper lesson behind many of Elon Musk’s productivity principles: look for the thing that is actually slowing the system down.

What Can We Learn from Elon Musk’s Approach to Productivity?

There is plenty about Musk’s working style that most people should not attempt to copy.

His workload is extreme. His companies operate in unusually demanding industries. His personal approach to work is built around circumstances that do not resemble the average employee’s day.

But his ideas about eliminating wasted effort are much easier to apply.

You do not need to work 80 hours a week to ask whether a meeting is necessary.

You do not need to run a billion-dollar company to question an outdated approval process.

And you certainly do not need to be Elon Musk to realize that clear communication is better than corporate jargon.

The most useful takeaway is therefore not “work like Elon Musk.”

It is “remove what does not need to be there.”

Remove the meeting that has no decision attached to it.

Remove the communication layer that only slows information down.

Remove the jargon that makes a simple idea difficult to understand.

Remove the rule that no longer serves its original purpose.

Remove the assumption that something must be done the way it has always been done.

That is where Musk’s productivity philosophy becomes practical.