For the vast majority of us, squeezing in a visit to the gym before work or nipping to post a parcel while taking a lunch break is about as advanced as our time management ever gets.
That's all well and good, but what happens when you decide you want to start blasting rockets into space and juggling two multi-billion dollar companies? We'd be willing to bet that sort of stuff is probably going to need a slightly more advanced allocation of time.
And indeed it does - or at least, so says Elon Musk, the bloke behind Tesla and SpaceX. He claims to work 100 hours every week.
"If other people are putting in 40 hours in a week, and you're putting in 100, you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve," he once said.
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The high-flying, world-changing tech entrepreneur splits his time between his two companies and manages to dedicate around 80 percent of his time to design and engineering.
Sounds like quite a task for a guy whose inbox is presumably bursting at the seams and whose daily to-do list is undoubtedly thicker than the Yellow Pages, but he's managing it somehow.
So, what's the secret?
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Well for one, Musk is constantly trying to improve the way he handles tasks and to optimise his practises.
He told Mashable in 2012: "I think it's very important to have a feedback loop, where you're constantly thinking about what you've done and how you could be doing it better.
"I think that's the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself."
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Musk avoids phone calls almost religiously, preferring instead to stick to methods of communication that allow him to respond on his own terms and in his own time. He also uses an obscure email address to keep people from spamming his inbox.
But the tech innovator's most effective weapon in the fight for time is the way in which he organises his days.
Musk likes to break his days up into five-minute increments, then every task he does throughout the day has to fit into one of those slots. He even eats lunch in five minutes, usually in meetings, and forgoes breakfast entirely.
It turns out breaking your day up into small segments can give your productivity a colossal boost. Five minutes may not seem like a lot but adhering to this practise almost certainly keeps Musk on track with pinpoint accuracy throughout his hectic days.
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He has also managed to figure out what the perfect amount of sleep is for him to function at the highest possible level.
"I tried to figure out what's the right amount of sleep," Musk told CHM Revolutionaries in 2013.
"I found I could drop below a certain threshold of sleep, and although I'd be awake more hours and I could sustain it, I would get less done because my mental acuity would be affected. So, I found, generally, the right number for me is around six to six-and-a half-hours, on average, per night."
Even after all of that, Musk still manages to spend family time with his five kids regularly: "I always try to reserve time for my kids because I love hanging out with them," he said at the 2016 Code Conference.
"Of anything in my life, I would say kids by far make me the happiest."
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Words: Paddy Maddison