A big thank you to Set the Agenda reader Dudney Sylla, Partnership Director at Axim Collaborative, who put this 2009 article on my radar a couple months ago. I’ve kept revisiting its wisdom since. In it, Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, describes two distinct types of schedules: the maker's and manager's.
Makers need long uninterrupted stretches of time to dedicate to cognitively demanding work. They conceive of their days as 1-2 long work blocks.
Managers typically take their day hour-by-hour (or in even smaller increments) and are constantly context-switching.
A quick ad-hoc meeting doesn’t faze a manager if they have an open block. But when a manager schedules an ad-hoc meeting with a maker, without considering how it fits in their maker schedule, a quick meeting or two can disrupt a full day’s work.
Neither schedule is inherently better, they serve different purposes.
Understanding the difference can help us manage our teams and our relationships with peers and leaders better
Early in my career, I worked in fundraising at an educational NGO that held a monthly family day. Since I didn’t have to be onsite, I used that day to plan. I’d make dozens of phone calls to schedule upcoming events with every department.
Unfortunately, those department heads were in charge of running family day, which was stressful and jam-packed. I was completely oblivious that my “free day” to plan was actually one of their busiest days of the month and not a good time to call about something happening in 3 weeks.
Since then, I’ve tried much harder to balance my own scheduling preferences with the needs of the people I’m scheduling with.
Invitations:
- Consider whether you and your teammates are primarily in maker or manager schedule mode and how you might be more cognizant of those modes and your schedule differences as you schedule meetings with others.
- Consider setting some scheduling norms with your team, boss, and/or peers. Example: meetings only between 1-4:00 ET, Mon-Thurs. You could even share the article with your team and discuss how this shows up in your workplace.
Understanding the difference can also help us better manage ourselves
The binary maker vs. manager distinction makes so much sense…until you stop and think about whether you or anyone you work with cleanly fits in one of those buckets. For most of us, we have responsibilities that require a manager schedule and we have work that needs a maker schedule.
I learned this the hard way when I oversaw a national survey system. Every time the survey was open, I’d send the survey link out and with that off my list, I'd plan to start a bigger strategic project (maker work). But then the questions would come in. Then I realized: answering ad-hoc questions about the survey was actually a core part of my job during that window. I was in manager mode whether I wanted to be or not. Once I accepted that, I started planning my maker work around the survey cycle instead of on top of it.
Invitations:
- Cluster meetings. Meetings require a different energy, so group them at the same time of day and/or same day(s) of week. The schedule can change seasonally (like mine with the surveys).
- Be realistic about what you can achieve in between meetings. You can probably knock out a few emails between meetings, but you won’t be able to draft a strategy deck. Don’t forget to account for meeting prep and follow-up tasks when you think about what you can achieve in a day.
- Hold office hours. By blocking consistent time when people know they can grab you, you’ll pre-empt the emergency meeting in the middle of your work block.
