I recently came across Walter Isaacson on Lex Fridman's podcast talking about Elon Musk's work ethic. Isaacson says that Musk is able to focus sequentially on many different things in a day, and he gives his 100% attention to each task at hand regardless of the number of other things he has to do that day.

As founders, even an incremental change in your productivity can mean a step change in your startup's overall productivity. Founders are often the bottlenecks, after all. There's so much advice around "unblocking your team", but I think just getting more things done might be a better way to improve the rest of the team's productivity.

So I've started worked in serial since the last few weeks. Every Monday, I assign a broad focus area for each day in the week, depending on the most impactful work I can do for the company at that time. I try not to complicate things by planning too much — a broad focus every day is enough. I create all-day events for each focus area without blocking the calendar, so I can still have other meetings during the day. Every day, apart from the meetings, I'm only working on the focus area.

It's been only three weeks since I've started doing this, and it has already been the most productive weeks for me this year. I've been pleasantly surprised how much I was able to get done across several completely different areas of work.

Maybe this Elon guy is onto something.