#maker 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.

When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you're done.

... 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.

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.

Episode 019 - Maker, Manager & the Artist's Productivity - @rsidneysmith @apinaud @fwade @artgelwicks

Eight years ago Paul Graham wrote an articlecharacterizing two different types of time management, each centering on either a maker or manager perspective. The maker schedule is that of the individual who needs longer stretches of time in order to create, whereas the manager schedule is structured around meetings and shorter periods of work times. But times, they are a-changing…and fast!  In this…

Paul Graham wrote a now-semi-famous article about the difference between "Maker's Schedule" and "Manager's Schedule". Maker's Schedule is where you want long, uninterrupted blocks of time to dive into the nuances and intricacies of technical work: programming, writing, making art, planning/designing, etc. Manager's Schedule is divided into hour or half-hour blocks, each of which is basically interchangeable.

He wrote the article with the intention of pointing out to Managers that they might get better results from Makers they manage if they stopped trying to book mid-day meetings with them, and to point out to startups that it's worth optimizing for having lots of maker time. I want to write about it from the perspective of a solopreneur/freelancer, although I suspect that this would apply to anyone who

has a reasonably large amount of control over how they spend their own time (includes most students beyond high school)

wants to do more than 8h/week of focused, technical work, on average

also wants to do some nontrivial amount of scheduled appointments

And it might still be interesting to the rest of you!

Experiments with maker time

In my 2014 Habit-a-week project, I focused on a number of habits geared towards increasing how much maker time I had available to me. "Maker time" here means something like "time during which I don't let anyone interrupt me, including me".

I had already been doing pomodoros for years. They're a kind of mini-maker time block, which lasts 25 minutes, followed by a 5 minute break in which I recommend not doing anything too distracting. In addition, I tried:

Focus Blocks: 1-3 times per day, I would just declare that I was having a focus block for the next few hours, and would turn off most means by which anyone could contact me (phone→airplane mode, and closing out chat windows) and just work on technical stuff for anywhere from 1-4 hours. I would also avoid divergent distractions like email or facebook during these blocks. These worked pretty well but it was sometimes hard to remember to schedule or start them.

Maniac Weekends: Click the link to watch a timelapse video of me working for 40 hours in just one weekend. Maniac Weeks/Weekends are pretty much the extreme end of Maker Time. You basically just say "I'm going to work this entire [several day period]" and you do it and then show the world. You even prepare your food beforehand so you don't have to distract yourself with cooking. They're a lot of fun; kind of like a hackathon but without the stress of a competition and deadlines.

Frogs First: Wanting something more sustainable and ongoing than the maniac weekends, I started a new daily routine where I would wake up and then immediately begin working on my most important task for that day. I tried to have interruptions start around noon at the earliest, so I'd get at least a few solid hours at the start of each day, ideally more.

All of these worked pretty well and had a substantial impact on my productivity. This year, now that I'm finished school, I realized that I could do whatever I wanted with my time. I decided that I wanted more maker time. I also knew that I wanted to have lots of skype calls, both with friends of mine who lived far away and with new Complice users (for a variety of reasons: taking notes as they signed up so I could improve the onboarding process, or helping them clarify their goals or learn how to use the software).

Explicit Maker/Manager Days

In order to have 10-20 calls every week without pulling my hair out, I knew I needed to set up a scheduling system. I did this on Calendly originally (which I prefer in some ways) but then switched to YouCanBook.me because I think their interface is more intuitive (i.e. it looks more like a calendar -_-).

Then I surveyed around 20 friends that I wanted to keep in touch with, and asked them what days & times they were available to skype. I put the results in a spreadsheet:

My conclusions were pretty simple:

I needed at least 3 call days to hit everyone

I needed a weekend day

people don't like calls on Mon/Fri

I decided to go with T-Th-Sa, although T-Th-Su was a close second. T-Th was necessitated by me not wanting to have any manager days be adjacent, because having a dozen calls in one day can be kind of draining. (I'm maybe not as extraverted as people think I am.)

Then I set up my youcanbook.me and told my friends to go book calls. Unfortunately some people don't seem to like the idea of using these sorts of systems. I don't know if they feel too formal or something? Anyway, the scheduler takes care of 90% of scheduling, and for the rest (e.g. my parents) it's not too hard to do it manually.

Now I have weeks that look like this:

Glorious, glorious, free time. Well, time that I intend to spend working intently. But unstructured time, that I can use to solve technical problems. The fuchsia event that you see every day is my daily nap, which is just as important on maker days.

How to do this yourself

Take a look at your week, and notice which commitments you can't move. That might be classes, if you're a student. Or meetings, if you're working a software job. It could also include club meetings or sports games, or regular outings with friends. Also note which days tend to have irregular events that you want to be available for. Try to figure out which times you could block off for yourself that would be least likely to interfere with other stuff.