Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 35 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Maker’s Schedule vs. Manager’s Schedule
— From Paul Graham’s blog by Paul Graham, Co-Founder & Partner, Y Combinator
A few years’ back, Paul Graham wrote a post on his blog where he finally deciphered the incompatibility between scheduling: there are people who deal with their time as managers, and people who deal with theirs as makers. And then there are the hybrids.
Hmmmm, what does all this mean?
Let me explain:
Graham writes in his blog, “The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one-hour intervals… When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done. Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command.”
The makers are programmers, writers, and anybody who needs large chunks of time to devote to focus on making whatever it is that they do. “They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started. When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.”
“Each type of schedule works fine by itself,” Graham continues. “Problems arise when they meet. Since most powerful people operate on the manager’s schedule, they’re in a position to make everyone resonate at their frequency if they want to. But the smarter ones restrain themselves, if they know that some of the people working for them need long chunks of time to work in.”
Managers and makers beware, now that we know how the others operate. Graham offers a solution that has worked for him: office hours clustered at the end of one day. That way managers and makers can indeed meet, but the meeting is not intruding into precious making time.
But what happens when you are a hybrid of both manager and maker? I know I am. And I thought I was going crazy for having a back-to-back meeting schedule on certain days, and reserving other days for long, uninterrupted chunks of time that I defended vehemently and refused to break up with meetings. On the latter, I’d go into “Monk Mode” as Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism, calls it.
I had, not knowing, created maker’s days and manager’s days in my calendar. Thanks to Graham, I now know that this is not a crazy thing to do if you’re a hybrid. You can also partition your day into maker’s hours and manager’s hours.
Graham’s case is also a good illustration. As the founder of Y Combinator, one of the most famous companies to provide seed funding for startups, when he and his team were starting, he “used to program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt [him]. Then [he’d] sleep till about 11 am, and come in and work until dinner on what [he] called ‘business stuff.’” He explains, “I never thought of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day, one on the manager’s schedule and one on the maker’s.”
Understanding these two schedules, and the way in which they interact or the way in which you can combine them if you are a hybrid, brought much clarity and peace of mind to me. I hope it will do the same for you and the way in which you use your time.
Are you a maker, a manager or a hybrid? Let me know in the comments here.
A reminder that, tomorrow, starts the 90-day sprint towards the end of the year — woohoo! Check out Achieve in 90 to focus on finishing your 2018 goals!
ACTION
TODAY: Figure out how whether you’re a manager or a maker, or both.
FUTURE: Now that you know about these two types of schedules, you can rearrange yours for your optimal performance as well as the optimal way in which you interact with your team and the outside world. Here’s a great post with some tips on how to do this.
Please share this post with managers, makers and hybrids, they will thank you! Email, Facebook or Twitter.
Another great piece, Helena! For me, Monday & Fridays (and often Saturdays and/or Sundays) are my Maker’s days, while Tues-Wed-Thurs are my Manager’s days. This gives me a four-day stretch (when needed) to “make” stuff (i.e., doing proposals, designing workshops and classes; writing blog posts; working on my book, etc.); and three mid-week days for “external” client-facing work (meetings, delivering workshops, networking, teaching, etc.). While it does not work out this way ALL the time, I’ve found that managing my schedule in this way really helps me to be most organized, productive, and sane.