Maker's vs Manager's Schedule

In 2009, Paul Graham coined the terms Maker's Schedule and Manager's Schedule to describe two different styles of work: One style or schedule of work involved long hours of focus, uninterrupted dedication to a single task, deep work that required a steady state of flow and peak productivity. This schedule was mostly practiced by makers - engineers, writers, and others that "make" things. The second style of work involved a daily structure that accommodated hourly slots that accommodated meetings, communication, planning strategies, and collaboration with others. This style of work was more common for managers who usually did not spend long hours in siloed focus, instead, maximized their productivity by organizing and managing the people reporting to them.

Paul Graham's article elucidated the difficulties makers faced in terms of loss of focus and morale when their schedules were disrupted, mostly by meetings, and elaborated on the conflict that arose when managers and leaders expected makers to comply with their style of working. Graham says that explaining the difference between the two schedules would help leaders understand the different workstyles, therefore, helping to reduce conflicts and collisions. And this has never been more important than it is now, as we radically and rapidly transform the workplace to become more distributed and hybrid. 

The threat to maker’s schedules in the new normal

The hybrid and remote workplace are built on the foundation of virtual meetings and instant communication since these processes lend to every business process, be it onboarding new talent, planning and launching new products, building teams, and ensuring business continuity. These virtual meetings cause the collision between the schedules of makers and managers, oftentimes demanding that makers oblige to managers’ schedules.   

Unfortunately, meetings are a risk to makers’ time, productivity, and satisfaction. Research from apa.org shows that it takes at least 25 minutes to get into a state of focussed work and flow and any context switches affect an individual’s productivity, leading to up to a 40% dip in productivity. 

In addition to risking a loss in productivity, when creators have to conform to a manager’s schedule, they lose the time needed to create and become unsatisfied. Sometimes, the lack of time to complete projects leads them to work extra hours and can cause burnout. 

This is why makers dread meetings. Many engineers, developers, and writers say that even a single meeting at 2 PM would lead them to not start a project at 12 PM because they know they cannot start a project unless they have long and uninterrupted work time.  

Finding Middle Ground

Since work cannot carry on without thriving virtual communication and collaboration, it can also not be successful unless makers produce quality work. When engineers have long, uninterrupted maker’s time for deep work, they produce great code, with lesser bugs, and lesser missed edge cases. This in turn leads to better team outcomes. It is hence extremely important that organizations build schedules that allow makers their time for deep work so that they can create meaningful work.

Managers and leaders must adopt practices and processes that optimize maker time for their team members. Here are some opportunities for managers to define a successful middle ground

Mindful meetings 

Start by improving the quality of your meetings. Which meetings are necessary? Who needs to attend these meetings? What is the meeting agenda? Answering these questions can be a great start to making meetings work. Also, make meeting agendas compulsory and encourage early sharing of agendas so that all attendees can be well-prepared to contribute productively. 

Adopt hybrid meeting etiquettes- be mindful of employee time zones, on or off-site locations, and work-life balance into consideration. Most importantly, when a meeting involves a maker, schedule all meetings to the beginning or the end of a workday so that they can focus through the rest of the time. Another great opportunity is to identify complete meeting free days so that makers have the whole day to create.

Better async work 

Asynchronous work allows employees the freedom to schedule focus time when they feel most productive while mindfully allocating time for collaborative work at other hours. Async work facilitates deep work which leads to lesser context switches due to interruptions and this can help the culture of the team to evolve into one that is respectful of the makers’ work style. 

Enable focus time and deep work 

Managers should stay aware of the many different work styles and human interpersonal complexities that exist in their teams and allow flexibility to accommodate the different work modes. Particularly when working with makers, enable and protect the maker time for employees so that they can bring their best creativity to their work. This will increase individual productivity and also the team’s output. 

Prioritize productivity over presenteeism

Several makers often become “invisible”, buried under long periods of quiet time while working on one project. This work style can lead to the maker going unnoticed and unappreciated or even unrewarded at the workplace, especially in the remote workplace. Managers should build a culture of visibility using data in the hybrid and remote workplace that encourages employees to focus on productivity without being preoccupied with the need to project presenteeism.  

Metrics as a diagnostic tool

For software engineers, the quality of code and the speed at which they produce code are leading indicators of productivity, and for good quality code, engineers need optimized maker’s time. Managers can use the data from their team’s calendar and meeting metrics to gain invaluable insight into their team’s focus time, maker’s time, and collab time. 

Data can help managers measure how much time their team members are able to spend on focused work without being interrupted by communication requests from tools like email or internal messaging. Data can provide an insight into the breakdown between focus time and collab time, presenting an opportunity to schedule collab time without risking maker’s time. Visibility into meeting metrics can help managers reduce the burden of frequent, or long, or ad-hoc meetings, adding to the available maker’s time. As leading industry benchmarks indicate, highly productive engineering teams are able to provide 70% of the workday as maker’s time to their individual contributors. It is imperative that managers stay cognizant of their team’s maker’s time, since only what is measured can be managed.

Maker time dashboard from Hatica:

Work and collaboration analytics can help managers and leaders get an elevated and complete viewpoint of the work environment in which employees collaborate. Analytics of how teams connect, communicate, and collaborate can help managers build a robust schedule of deep work for makers, and thereby improve employee engagement, performance, well-being, and productivity.

Focus time follows the Pomodoro technique of balancing focussed work with slots for breaks. In practice, when an engineer has blocks of time, with short interruptions, potentially interruptions such as stand-up meetings, or urgent Slack requests, we identify these blocks of time as available for focus work.

However, focus time differs from maker’s time since the latter is characterized by absolutely no fragmentation in time and lasts longer than two hours, often extending into several hours at a stretch. This extended period of maker time promotes a better quality of work since developers achieve and maintain a steady-state of flow, with lower chances of missing edge cases leading to lesser bugs and cleaner code. This long stretch of time also makes way for uninterrupted thought, creativity, and ideas.  

Hatica helps improve makers’ time by tracking the extent of interruptions teammates are subject to due to meetings, communication, and collaboration requests. In reality, many managers are able to promote allocation of focus time for their teammates by promoting time chunks that are not spent in meetings but still allowing short interruptions or context switches. However, managers are often unable to optimize makers’ time, that is, large blocks of time that are completely uninterrupted. Identifying interruptions can help managers gauge how much makers’ time their team members get. These insights can paint a factual picture of maker time and interruptions trends, allowing managers to identify and fix interruption issues thereby optimizing maker time. 

As the workplace undergoes a phenomenal transformation towards a distributed, remote, and hybrid work model, managers should accommodate the maker’s schedule in the new normal, leveraging data and adopting technology and processes to facilitate better ways of working for everyone. 

💡 Hatica’s work analytics platform equips engineering managers with data about their team’s available makers’ time and provides visibility into factors that fragment makers' time such as meeting and communication load. Come, take a look → 

Our original article on the same topic and more engineering insights here.