From maker to manager
On my transition from a maker's schedule to a manager's schedule
Paul Graham has an excellent essay called, Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.
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…
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.
I was initially hired at SharpestMinds as a web developer, and I thrived on the maker’s schedule. I quickly developed a distaste for meetings and tried to optimize my schedule and habits for deep work. An ideal work day for me was being able to focus on a single, challenging task.
I remember some tension with the founders over schedule preferences.1 But the maker vs. manager dichotomy helped put things in perspective. The founders’ schedules were consumed by sales, customer service, and an endless list of other “keep the business alive” tasks. Whereas I had the luxury of focusing on one or two tasks all day.
Makers need big chunks of uninterrupted time to be productive. Switching between tasks has a high cost and it can take a while to build up momentum. Especially when writing software—you have to keep a lot in RAM at once. The SharpestMinds founders’ understood my maker preferences and gave me the space to optimize for deep work. They were the smart ones, according to Paul Graham:
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.
Now, having the responsibilities of CEO, I find myself pulled increasingly towards a manager’s schedule. Though I still do some programming, my days writing code all day are gone. My days are now being consumed by sales, marketing, accounting, customer service, and the endless grind of “keep the business alive” tasks.
There is a risk of indentifying too much with that grind—of equating a successful work day with “amount of things done.” I’ve seen this happen to my teammates, and I’ve seen it happen to me. But a day full of schlepping leaves little time for thinking and building for the long-term.
Paul Graham is critical of the manager’s schedule. He started as a maker and knows how much value can be created with large, uninterupted blocks of time.
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.
Like Graham, I am resisting. A pure maker’s schedule is a thing of the past for me, but I still can—and should—find room for deep work. My mornings are kept (mostly) free of meetings, for example. That’s where I’m trying to embed a maker’s schedule into my manager’s schedule. My mornings are my writing time, my programming time, my spend-three-hours-figuring-out-how-to-get-Google-Analytics-to-do-what-I-want time.
But it’s a challenge. My schedule is not as predictable as it once was (wake up, write code, eat lunch, write code). I need a certain amount of slack to handle the various fires that inevitably come up. And I need to be available to my team and our mentors and mentees if they need me.
Adapting my habits to the demands of a manager, while keeping the maker in me alive will require continuous experimentation. Another search for process/team fit.
Now, back to building (and managing).
- Russell
The founders: Edouard and Jeremie Harris