The “Maker’s Schedule” vs the “Manager’s Schedule”

When I was reading Josh Kaufman’s “ The Personal MBA “, he shared this interesting viewpoint about our calendars from Paul Graham. He said:

Paul Graham, a venture capitalist, programmer, and essayist, calls this batching strategy “Maker’s Schedule/Manager’s Schedule.” If you’re trying to create something, the worst thing you can possibly do is to try to fit creative tasks in between administrative tasks-context switching will kill your productivity. The “Maker’s Schedule” consists of large blocks of uninterrupted time; the “Manager’s Schedule” is broken up into many small chunks for meetings. Both schedules serve different purposes-just don’t try to combine them if your goal is to get useful work done.

My initial reading was that most of us should work to have a “Maker’s Schedule” so we don’t kill our productivity, and perhaps that’s true, but there are big exceptions.

It reminded me of someone I worked with years ago when he was a project manager. He was a great guy and worked hard, but he tried to have a “Maker’s Schedule” and that just didn’t work for his kind of role. If you’re a project manager, you have to live by more of a “Manager’s Schedule”, where context switching IS the role. Ultimately, it led to him moving on to a different company (and a very different role) where a “Maker’s Schedule” was the…