In almost every industry these days, you’ll find two kinds of schedules. Not all schedules are created equal. Not all roles should think about their time the same way. In fact, much of our workplace angst can be boiled down to the square-peg-round-hole reality that we’re putting a certain kind of work into the wrong kind of schedule.

In 2009, Paul Graham wrote an essay called Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.​

Paul Graham founded Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley incubator that spawned countless unicorn tech companies and is responsible for billions in economic production over the last two decades. In his essay, he argues that there are two kinds of schedules: the Maker’s Schedule and the Manager’s Schedule. Here’s my take on the idea.

The Manager’s Schedule.

The manager schedule is most likely the one you’re familiar with. The manager's days are broken up into blocks of 30 minutes or one hour and each one is dedicated to a task or meeting. Manager schedules are great if your job is to manage a team of people and the primary function of your role is to make decisions, communicate with others, and delegate tasks.

This type of schedule can be found all over our society. Even consider the way public school is set up. You go from class to class and shift focus from one subject to the next every hour or so. That’s not entirely bad if you want to cover a broad range of subjects or you need to have a broad range of experiences.

However, take a step back from the default view of how we think we ought to manage our time and you’ll realize a couple of drawbacks to the manager schedule.

First, the default assumption is that everything should take 30 minutes or an hour. What if a meeting doesn’t need to be that long? What if the decision could be made in half the time, or perhaps you don’t even need to meet at all? This problem is especially nefarious in our digital, work-from-home age. If you schedule a meeting with me for an hour. I’m going to subconsciously assume that the conversation we are going to have must require an hour. In reality, work is varied in length. Many things could be done faster than we assume and others require much more time than the default setting might allow.

Second, manager schedules are often filled to the brim with appointments and tasks. There’s often very little margin. They don’t have to be this way, but the default view of seeing your work broken up into appointments also tends to come with a view that unscheduled time is wasted time. This is a relic of the industrial age where production was down to the minute and every minute we weren’t producing meant less revenue for the company. Today’s work just isn’t that linear.

Finally, manager schedules often fall victim to context switching. Context switching is that nasty little process of shifting your attention from one task, person, meeting, or conversation, to another. Every time you have to make a change, your brain has to close any loops opened in the first context before it can fully engage the new context. Studies show this process usually takes about 15-20 minutes and often our focus on the new task just isn’t 100%.

So what if you took a step back from the default view of managing your time and realized that the manager schedule wasn’t quite working for you? How would you know? What is the alternative?

The Maker Schedule.

You might want to consider a switch away from a manager schedule if you find yourself frequently experiencing the following symptoms:

• You struggle to get momentum with your work and often feel interrupted.
• You are in a lot of meetings but don’t often have much to contribute.
• You are prone to miss deadlines and often feel rushed.
• You don’t manage many people and you’re more of an individual contributor.

If any of these are common issues in your schedule, let me introduce you to the Maker Schedule.

The Maker schedule is much less structured, involves long blocks of time for creative or “deep” work, and prioritizes freedom from distractions and context switching.

In the past, this kind of schedule was only reserved for certain trades that demanded flexibility and focus. But today, many of our jobs require more focused work time than we realize. Do you ever have work that requires at least 30 minutes just to get started? Do you have big ambitious projects that require deep thinking and focus for extended periods of time? Does your work require long-range planning and consideration of many interrelated factors?

If any of these questions are true of your work, you probably need a Maker’s schedule more than you realize.

In short, a maker schedule is marked by long chunks of uninterrupted time where you can focus on a singular task or project without having to think about other functions in your job or in your company.

Listen, I hear what you’re saying. What if my job requires that I be interruptible? What if my job is essentially going from one meeting to the next just helping everyone work together? That’s great, you should adopt a more traditional Manager’s schedule.

But, if you feel like you would benefit from extended time without distraction consider trying the maker schedule, or some hybrid of both.

In my main job, I supervise 6 people and oversee a diverse set of functions. I also need time to do long-range planning, writing, and deep thinking. If I don’t employ both kinds of schedules I just can’t do my job well.

My ideal week balances the two kinds of schedules. In general, I try to batch as many meetings as possible on Monday and Tuesday. My calendar on those days is a pretty classic manager schedule.

Wednesday through Friday I block out 9 am - 12 pm for deep work. I define deep work with the following characteristics:

• Extended time. Usually 90 minutes or more.
• Breaks every 45 minutes to move and think.
• Focused on one project.
• Aimed at a specific result that I committed to ahead of time. Showing up without a clear plan is a sure way to spin your wheels.

Blocking out this time has been a game-changer. I can be fully invested in my “meeting days” because I know that there’s already time blocked off for the most important projects later in the week.

Now, I understand this doesn’t apply evenly to every kind of job. We don’t all have the same amount of control over our calendars. You might have to advocate for this kind of setup with your boss or your team but I promise you that you’ll find a ton of benefit simply by acknowledging that not all schedules are the same. Simply recognizing you can have two different approaches to your time unlocks all kinds of possibilities for how you work and how your brain shows up to that work.

So, here are a few prompts that could inspire some action this week that might just transform the way you view your time.

• Look at your calendar over the last few weeks and count the hours spent in manager mode vs maker mode.
• Pay attention to how many times in a typical day you have to “context switch.”
• Journal at the end of the day and try to assess how much time you were focused vs. distracted or somewhere in the middle.
• Read the article to get Paul Graham’s thoughts on this.
• Ask yourself what you could get done if you had 2 hours of uninterrupted time to focus on one project.

That’s it for this week. I hope this was helpful! Next week I’ll break down another one of Paul Graham’s essays on how to do great work.

Also, in future weeks I want to spend more time exploring the idea of Deep Work. This is a trending topic right now and I think people are waking up to the reality that they’re drowning in meetings and distractions.

Till next Friday,

Craig