Maker’s Schedule vs Manager’s Schedule
Balancing Maker's and Manager's Schedules to Build a Fast-Growing Startup
At the end of a sprint, during one squad's retrospective, a teammate shared, "It was hard to focus this sprint because there was just too much going on." I was also struggling at the time with context switching between tasks due to my growing management responsibilities.
As I analyzed the difficulties shared during the retrospective, I discovered a few things. The members who were struggling the most were either juggling management and hands-on work, or they belonged to multiple squads and task forces.
Since I often think about our organizational work structure and productivity, I asked myself a lot of questions: "Is there a way to solve this structurally? What is the root cause of the problem?"
That's when I stumbled upon an article written in 2009 by the legendary Paul Graham (PG): Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule. Before trying to solve the problem structurally, this was a great read that helped me understand the very nature of the work itself, which is the essence of the issue.
Below, I want to explore the characteristics of both the maker's and manager's schedules, the problems that can arise between them, and how we might try to solve those problems.
Maker’s Schedule
This usually means having a schedule for tasks that require about 3 to 4 hours of intense, uninterrupted focus. By increasing your focus on a single task over a long period, that dedication ultimately reflects in the quality of the work.
Product makers primarily fall into this schedule. If I had to list a few roles that fit this category, they would be:
Engineers
Designers
Content creators, etc.
If we constantly interrupt members who are on a maker's schedule, their output might suffer or the quality of their work could drop. From my own personal experience, I remember it costing a significant amount of effort to switch contexts due to frequent interruptions and then try to get back on track. (Of course, I find myself frequently interrupting our makers too... sorry about that!)
Manager’s Schedule
Typically, team leads operate on a manager's schedule. Leads act as coordinators, ensuring that makers can successfully deliver their output. Because of this, they go through various short-block meetings (30 minutes to an hour) required for coordination, such as communication meetings, strategy meetings, and collaboration syncs.
When They Collide
Since plans never go exactly as we hope, team leads have to step in and coordinate or collaborate periodically to protect the stability of the final output. However, since they need to exchange help with the product makers in that process, there are times when they have to request a meeting. This is the exact moment an interruption hits a member on a maker's schedule, potentially causing them to lose their deep focus.
Meetings are absolutely necessary to get things done. So, how can we minimize the collisions between the maker's schedule and the manager's schedule?
How Can We Balance Them Better?
#1 Increase Meeting Quality
If a meeting is completely unavoidable, we simply need to raise the quality of the meeting itself.
Here are two highly effective methods I've found:
Reduce the meeting time
Only invite necessary people
The more you cut down the time, the more fluff gets stripped out of potentially rambling meetings, leaving only the core points.
Make sure to only invite people who are absolutely essential. (If someone doesn't speak a single word during the entire meeting, they might not really need to be there.) Also, if core agendas are well-distributed across regular syncs (daily standups, sprint plannings, sprint reviews & retrospectives, 1:1s, weekly metric syncs, etc.), you can drastically reduce the number of surprise, ad-hoc meetings.
#2 Designate Meeting Days/Times
Setting specific days or time blocks strictly for meetings is another way to prevent scheduling collisions.
Looking at a single day, you could try front-loading all meetings in the morning when work starts. Looking at it from a two-week sprint perspective, you could pack all meetings into the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of the first week, and block off the rest of the time purely for deep work.
#3 Minimize Pings During Focus Time
With our highly developed online work environments these days, interruptions don't just come from colleagues requesting meetings—they also come from our work tools. Therefore, when you're deeply focused on a task, you should use status settings to let your peers know, and then reply after you finish your deep work.
For example, set your status using Slack and Google Calendar. Also, utilize Focus modes on Mac and iOS to silence notifications.
#4 Set a Focus Time
This naturally ties into point #3. Define a specific focus block so that no one schedules a meeting over it, allowing you to dive deep into your work.
#5 Offload to Asynchronous Meetings
As work environments become more diverse, synchronous meetings can sometimes be difficult to pull off. In these cases, you can share the agenda asynchronously via Slack or email. Since this removes the need to align everyone's schedules, you completely bypass the risk of scheduling collisions.
Conclusion
In a fast-growing startup, it's incredibly common to struggle with balancing deep work time and meetings. Because so many members are juggling both management and hands-on work, individuals often experience their own internal collisions between the maker's and manager's schedules. When this happens, it's worth checking through a sprint retrospective or personal retrospective to see if there's a balancing issue between meetings and focused time (Deep work). The important thing is that when you look into this problem, trying to quantify it makes it significantly easier to pull out actionable items later.
Ultimately, from a manager's perspective, we need to constantly think about how to build an environment where makers can focus and deliver results. In that process, the makers themselves should proactively offer feedback to the company on how they can carve out their own time to focus (Deep work).