Elon Musk has a procedure he repeated to his engineers, in his words, “to an annoying degree.” He calls it the algorithm. It was built for rocket factories, but it works just as well on a bloated calendar, and the order of the steps is the entire point.
What are the five steps?
First, question every requirement, and demand the name of the actual person who set it. Second, delete the part or process. Third, simplify what remains. Fourth, accelerate it. And fifth, only now, automate it.1
Most people, faced with a slow or painful process, jump straight to step four or five. They try to make the bad thing faster or hand it to a machine. Musk’s hard-won lesson is that this is backwards. The most common error of a smart engineer, he says, is to optimise a thing that should not exist.2
Why does step one demand a name?
Because a requirement attached to a person can be challenged, and a requirement attached to “the legal department” or “policy” cannot. Musk insists on the name of whoever actually set each requirement, because requirements that come from a faceless department are the ones nobody will defend and nobody will remove. And he warns that requirements from smart, respected people are the most dangerous of all, since everyone is too impressed to question them. Half of what clogs your week is a rule whose author has left, whose reason has lapsed, and which survives only because no one ever asked who it was for.
Why delete before you simplify?
Because the cheapest, fastest, most reliable part is the one that is not there. Simplifying a process you should have removed is wasted craft. Musk pairs the delete step with a deliberate provocation: if you do not later have to add back at least ten percent of what you deleted, you did not delete enough.3 The instruction is to cut aggressively, past the point of comfort, because timid trimming leaves the waste intact. You can always restore the rare thing you genuinely needed. You will almost never miss the rest.
How does this map onto your week?
Take your time audit and run every recurring item through the steps. The weekly report: who asked for it, and do they still read it? If no one will own it, delete it. The standing meeting: what decision does it produce that an email could not? Simplify it to fifteen minutes or kill it. The status update you copy and paste: automate it, but only after you have confirmed it deserves to exist at all.
The order protects you from the signature mistake of the AI era. Faced with a tedious task, the modern reflex is to automate it in thirty seconds and feel clever. Musk’s algorithm forces the prior questions: should this exist, can it be deleted, can it be simplified? By the time you reach automation, you are accelerating only what genuinely survived scrutiny. That is the difference between a factory that runs lean and one that runs fast while building parts no one needs. Your calendar is the factory. The algorithm is how you find the fiberglass mats.
Frequently asked questions
What is Musk’s algorithm?
It is a five-step process Elon Musk applies to remove waste: question every requirement, delete the part or process, simplify what remains, accelerate it, and only then automate. The order matters, with automation deliberately last.
Why is automate the last step in Musk’s algorithm?
Because automating a task is the most expensive way to discover it should have been deleted. Questioning and removing come first so you never invest in optimising work that should not exist.
How do you apply Musk’s algorithm to your own work?
Run each recurring task through the steps: ask who actually required it and why, delete it if no one will defend it, simplify and shorten what survives, then automate only the genuine remainder.
About the author
Tom Goodwin is the author of Don’t Work Harder, a book about taking the time AI gives back as time rather than more work. He is a co-founder of GAMEPLAN and writes on productivity, technology, and the economics of the working week.
Footnotes
Footnotes
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Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk (Simon & Schuster, 2023): “the algorithm”, question every requirement, delete, simplify, accelerate, automate, and the named-person rule. ↩
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Musk, quoted in Isaacson, Elon Musk (2023), and his 2021 Everyday Astronaut interview: “the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimise a thing that should not exist.” ↩
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Isaacson, Elon Musk (2023): the rule that if you do not add back at least 10 percent of what you delete, you did not delete enough. ↩