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Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
"...the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes
worry a whole day."
Charles Dickens
July 2009
One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that
they're on a different type of schedule from other people.
Meetings cost them more.
There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's
schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is
for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book,
with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off
several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default
you change what you're doing every hour.
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. But there's another way of using time
that's common among people who make things, like programmers
and writers. 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. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no
problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always
something coming on the next hour; the only question is what.
But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they
have to think about it.
For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like
throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch
from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you
work.
I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting
commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning
or afternoon. But in addition there's sometimes a cascading
effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I'm
slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the
morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you're a
maker, think of your own case. Don't your spirits rise at the
thought of having an entire day free to work, with no
appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are
correspondingly depressed when you don't. And ambitious
projects are by definition close to the limits of your
capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them
off.
Each type of schedule works fine by itself. 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.
Our case is an unusual one. Nearly all investors, including
all VCs I know, operate on the manager's schedule. But Y
Combinator runs on the maker's schedule. Rtm and Trevor and I
do because we always have, and Jessica does too, mostly,
because she's gotten into sync with us.
I wouldn't be surprised if there start to be more companies
like us. I suspect founders may increasingly be able to
resist, or at least postpone, turning into managers, just as a
few decades ago they started to be able to resist switching
from jeans to suits.
How do we manage to advise so many startups on the maker's
schedule? By using the classic device for simulating the
manager's schedule within the maker's: office hours. Several
times a week I set aside a chunk of time to meet founders
we've funded. These chunks of time are at the end of my
working day, and I wrote a signup program that ensures all the
appointments within a given set of office hours are clustered
at the end. Because they come at the end of my day these
meetings are never an interruption. (Unless their working day
ends at the same time as mine, the meeting presumably
interrupts theirs, but since they made the appointment it must
be worth it to them.) During busy periods, office hours
sometimes get long enough that they compress the day, but they
never interrupt it.
When we were working on our own startup, back in the 90s, I
evolved another trick for partitioning the day. I used to
program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at
night no one could interrupt me. Then I'd sleep till about 11
am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called
"business stuff." 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.
When you're operating on the manager's schedule you can do
something you'd never want to do on the maker's: you can have
speculative meetings. You can meet someone just to get to know
one another. If you have an empty slot in your schedule, why
not? Maybe it will turn out you can help one another in some
way.
Business people in Silicon Valley (and the whole world, for
that matter) have speculative meetings all the time. They're
effectively free if you're on the manager's schedule. They're
so common that there's distinctive language for proposing
them: saying that you want to "grab coffee," for example.
Speculative meetings are terribly costly if you're on the
maker's schedule, though. Which puts us in something of a
bind. Everyone assumes that, like other investors, we run on
the manager's schedule. So they introduce us to someone they
think we ought to meet, or send us an email proposing we grab
coffee. At this point we have two options, neither of them
good: we can meet with them, and lose half a day's work; or we
can try to avoid meeting them, and probably offend them.
Till recently we weren't clear in our own minds about the
source of the problem. We just took it for granted that we had
to either blow our schedules or offend people. But now that
I've realized what's going on, perhaps there's a third option:
to write something explaining the two types of schedule. Maybe
eventually, if the conflict between the manager's schedule and
the maker's schedule starts to be more widely understood, it
will become less of a problem.
Those of us on the maker's schedule are willing to compromise.
We know we have to have some number of meetings. All we ask
from those on the manager's schedule is that they understand
the cost.
Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Jessica
Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
Related:
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#How to Do What You Love* * #Good and Bad Procrastination*
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#Turkish Translation* * #French Translation*
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#Korean Translation* * #German Translation*
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