Maker vs. Manager vs. Morning Time
Yesterday’s post on being more productive in the morning reminded me of Paul Graham’s essay regarding manager versus maker time.
Paul’s simple point is that “doing work” requires a different type of mindset and workflow than “managing other people doing work”. Most programmers completely agree, so I encourage you to read his essay.
One of the points that complete resonates with me is:
…there’s [a] 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.
I couldn’t possibly agree with this more. I feel like in order to be maximally productive, I have to have at least a 3-hour chunk of completely uninterrupted time. And, sometimes that doesn’t even work…as Graham writes:
…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.
Yes! Absolutely!
Rereading Graham’s essay is going to cause me to be more careful about scheduling meetings at Cheezburger.
Right now, we only have two types of meetings: an all-team meeting at Monday morning, and several daily standups for smaller project teams. Typically, those meetings are all held in the morning, and I’m going to work to keep them that way…perhaps designating the afternoon as “maker time”. Although, that is incongruent with the whole “morning people are more productive” idea, so maybe the key is to move the meetings earlier in the morning.
I’m not sure…what are your thoughts on this?
Scott –
I wrestled with exactly this problem and my best solution was to schedule maker days versus manager days until that wasn’t sustainable either. I then approached maker time differently and put together a set of work hacks I wrote about here: http://www.ashmaurya.com/2009/12/achieving-flow-in-a-lean-startup/
This model has been working for me quite well.
Cheers,
Ash
Ash Maurya
16 Jul 10 at 7:57 am
Living 3 hours earlier than Seattle, my time is especially segmented by “late morning” meetings. They end up being at 1:00 or 1:30pm (just after lunch) so I can’t start on any work right after lunch, because I know I have a standup coming up.
Jacob
19 Jul 10 at 12:13 pm
I get in early. Well, early for me. Around 7am. From 7am to 9am you will find me focused, heads down and getting some more tricky projects polished out. This is the perfect time for me to come back to a project that wouldn’t validate or refused to display well on IE but fine in every other browser. This tiny bit of time is the ONLY time in the whole day I can focus without any distractions, meetings or fiery emergency projects. Working as a contractor at Msft we have stand up “scrum” meetings where we quickly when over critical projects while giving only a few sentences to update to the rest of the team. This format was surprisingly effective and gave everyone enough information to know what was going on and remember as well as trigger the right people to step in and help if necessary.
Lyndi
20 Jul 10 at 10:39 am
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