Are you a Maker or a Manager? Look at your daily schedule

If you haven’t read Paul Graham’s classic essay, “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule,” you may find it’s the most thought-provoking thing you read this week.

Graham – founder of tech startup accelerator Y Combinator — divides information workers into two groups:

Managers (e.g., business owners, line managers, project managers, and other “boss” types), and
Makers (e.g., writers, programmers, designers, and other creative or analytical types)

Each type needs a very different type of daily schedule to be productive. Most companies are run to meet the needs of the Manager type. But if your team members are working on the wrong type of schedule for their type of job, they can lose days of productivity a week… and thousands of dollars a year.

Managers (by the Hour) vs. Makers (by the Day)

Graham posits that Managers work best in hourly chunks, which are perfect for managers’ meeting-intensive days. But Makers, he says, need uninterrupted blocks of time — ideally at least half a day at a time, and preferably a full day at a time.

The nature of Makers’ work means that they need time to settle in. As Graham notes:

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.

As much as it pains me as an hours-driven project manager, I have to acknowledge that Maker tasks like troubleshooting a coding problem, creating design concepts, or writing a blog article don’t easily fit into a pre-specified block of hours.

In retrospect, this explains why a former manager — a Creative Director — loved when I could rearrange his schedule to create meeting-free days for him. He needed uninterrupted time to do his Maker tasks.

Putting This into Dollars: Losing $315K/year for Five Makers

Say your team includes a software developer getting billed out at $150 an hour and s/he’s supposed to bill seven hours a day, 48 weeks a year. If poorly scheduled meetings wreck his or her productivity for 1.5 days a week, that means $63,000 in lost billables.

And worse, if you have five people like that, your company is losing $315,000 a year in potential billables.

If you schedule a designer to meet at 10:30am or 3:00pm, you’re killing productivity for at least half their day, because they can’t fully dive into what they’d be working on otherwise.

There’s also an intangible cost — people tend to be satisfied at work when they feel like they’re making consistent forward progress. That’s hard to achieve when they keep getting interrupted.

What I’ve Changed as a Project Manager

After discovering the Maker vs. Manager concept, it’s radically changed how I interact with Makers at work (that is, hesketh.com‘s developers, designers, and marketing strategists).

I still need to meet with Makers, but now I make sure to “chunk” meetings together (when we have our daily company-wide Huddle at 11:45). I also schedule weekly project meetings with Makers (chunked around the mid-day meeting core), so they aren’t surprised by as many last-minute meetings.

Now that I’ve realized how hard it is for them to switch between projects — one developer said it takes him 1-2 hours to get his head around switching into a task in a different project — I also do my best to schedule tasks for just one project at a time, so I’m not forcing them to mentally switch between multiple clients in just an hour or two.

Finally, I also think first — if I need to interrupt a Maker when they’re focused on specific large tasks, I ask myself, is the interruption going to be worth it?

Acknowledging My Maker Side

I need to acknowledge that I occasionally need to go into Maker mode myself (e.g., when I’m scheduling a project, reviewing documentation, or testing functionality on a new website). In that case, I find it helps to work from home or do it after-hours, when there are fewer interruptions.

To be fair, I love meeting-free half-days, too. They make it easier to get through my to-do list. And as an occasional writer, I also find it’s easier to write and edit blog articles on a wide-open weekend than in the evening after work.

Are You a Maker or a Manager?

As a project manager who’s juggling multiple clients and projects every day, and with a calendar with quickly-filling hourly chunks, I know I’m primarily in the Manager category.

How about you – are you living the schedule that makes you most productive?