I came across a very insightful post from Paul Graham. Many of us know a manager who literally has meetings booked all day back to back, sometimes double or even triple booked. These are people who book meetings with themselves in order to have a block of time show busy in their schedule so they can do some non-meeting work. They end up with a week like this:

But what I hadn't thought about was how that changes the way they think about time, and about using up someone else's. Paul says:

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.

Thing is, lots of us work on a completely different schedule - a maker's schedule. We need long chunks of time to get into flow and to take advantage of that state to produce. A scheduled interruption, in the form of a meeting, can ruin an entire morning or afternoon. It may not be logical and it may irritate other people, but it's still true. Read Paul's article to be convinced - he articulates this beautifully and he really crystallized the issue for me.

I find myself slowly moving into a manager's schedule these days. I'm typically juggling a lot of projects, I am a manager, I have a lot of meetings and conference calls, and I spend less and less time heads down creating. This has caused some conflict with other people in my company who are still on maker's schedules. It has also caused conflict for me - when I have a maker-style day, I don't take care of the usual zillion little things like returning phone calls, answering emails and so on, and when I have a manager-style day, I don't produce as much "stuff" - code, decks, demo scripts, proposals, or whatever - as I otherwise would. Having names for the concepts should let me understand what's going on a whole lot better. Thanks Paul!

Kate