Maker vs. Manager: How Your Schedule Can Make or Break You

Consider two contrasting daily schedules.

Novelist Haruki Murakami starts writing at 4am and writes for about 5-6 hours straight. Then he runs or swims, and reads or listens to music before a 9pm bedtime. He’s known for his strict discipline.

Entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, in contrast, starts at 6am and splits his day into tiny slots, mostly meetings, some as short as 3 minutes. Between meetings he makes calls. Any free moment, he posts on social media. His day is a never-ending circle of managing, organizing, instructing, deciding, planning, and advising.

The numerous articles about the routines of successful people miss the point. Waking early doesn’t make you a novelist. Segmenting your day doesn’t make you an entrepreneur.

The lesson isn’t what time to set your alarm, which journalling prompt to use, or how long to wait before drinking your coffee. The lesson is that different work requires different schedules.

Murakami and Vaynerchuk’s contrasting days illustrate maker and manager schedules.

Paul Graham of Y Combinator first described this concept in a 2009 essay. From Graham’s distinction between makers and managers, we learn that doing creative work and overseeing others requires consideration of the way time is structured.

What’s the Difference?

A manager’s day is sliced into tiny slots, each with a pre-determined purpose. The bulk of their time is spent gathering information and making decisions. A secretary may plan the schedule due to the volume of meetings, which further distances the manager from the headache of scheduling.

Managers most of their time reacting and “putting out fires.” It’s an endless race from one fire to the next. Managers are always always behind, with barely a moment before the next thing.

Managers don’t necessarily need the capacity for deep focus — they primarily need the ability to make fast, smart decisions. In a three-minute meeting, they have the potential to generate (or destroy) enormous value through their decisions and expertise.

A maker’s schedule is different. It has long blocks for focusing on particular tasks, or entire days devoted to one activity. The more meetings, the less work gets done. Dividing a maker’s day into minutes would be tantamount to doing nothing.

Makers need to do one thing really well.

While meetings are the life of managers, they are the enemy of makers. While managers want them, makers want to avoid them. Paul Graham observes:

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.

It makes sense. The two work styles could not be more different.

A manager’s job is to organize people and make decisions.

...a big part of a middle manager’s work is to supply information and know-how, and to impart a sense of the preferred method of handling things to the groups under his control and influence. A manager also makes and helps to make decisions. Both kinds of basic managerial tasks can only occur during face-to-face encounters, and therefore only during meetings. Thus, I will assert again that a meeting is nothing less than the medium through which managerial work is performed. That means we should not be fighting their very existence, but rather using the time spent in them as efficiently as possible.

A maker creates tangible value. Makers work alone or under a manager, possibly with others. “Maker” encompasses writers, artists, programmers, carpenters, chefs, biohackers, designers – anyone who designs, creates, serves, and thinks.

Making anything meaningful demands time, and the right schedule helps. The path of making something is the path of figuring it out. And no one likes to be interrupted when they are totally focused on figuring something out. Take a look at the quintessential maker schedule of the prolific (to say the least) writer Isaac Asimov, as described in his memoir:

I wake at five in the morning. I get to work as early as I can. I work as long as I can. I do this every day of the week, including holidays. I don’t take vacations voluntarily and I try to do my work even when I’m on vacation. (And even when I’m in the hospital.)

In other words, I am still and forever in the candy store [where he worked as a child]. Of course, I’m not waiting on customers; I’m not taking money and making change; I’m not forced to be polite to everyone who comes in (in actual fact, I was never good at that). I am, instead, doing things I very much want to do — but the schedule is there; the schedule that was ground into me; the schedule you would think I would have rebelled against once I had the chance.

The Intersection Between Makers and Managers

It’s common for a job to involve both maker and manager duties. Elon Musk is one such example. His schedule involves managing as CEO of multiple companies, but he spends an estimated 80% of his time designing and engineering. How he does this is fascinating. He plans his two schedules differently. When in maker mode he avoids calls and emails and works in large chunks. When in manager mode, he breaks his day into 5-minute slots.

Those who successfully combine both schedules do so by clearly distinguishing between them, setting boundaries, and adjusting their environment accordingly. They don’t alternate between designing and meetings hourly.

In his role as adviser to startups, Paul Graham sets boundaries between his two types of work:

How do we manage to advise so many startups on the maker’s schedule? By using the classic device for simulating the manager’s schedule within the maker’s: office hours. Several times a week I set aside a chunk of time to meet founders we’ve funded. These chunks of time are at the end of my working day, and I wrote a signup program that ensures [that] all the appointments within a given set of office hours are clustered at the end. Because they come at the end of my day these meetings are never an interruption. (Unless their working day ends at the same time as mine, the meeting presumably interrupts theirs, but since they made the appointment it must be worth it to them.) During busy periods, office hours sometimes get long enough that they compress the day, but they never interrupt it.

Likewise, during his time working on his own startup, Graham figured out how to partition his day and get both categories of work done without sacrificing his sanity:

When we were working on our own startup, back in the ’90s, I evolved another trick for partitioning the day. I used to program from dinner till about 3am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then, I’d sleep till about 11am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called “business stuff.” I never thought of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day, one on the manager’s schedule and one on the maker’s.

Murakami also combined making and managing during his early days as a novelist.

Like many other makers, his creative work began as a side project while he held another job. Murakami ran a jazz club. In a 2008 New Yorker profile, Murakami described having a schedule similar to Graham’s when running a startup. He spent his days overseeing the jazz club — doing paperwork, organizing staff, keeping track of the inventory, and so on. When the club closed after midnight, Murakami started writing and continued until he was exhausted. After reaching a tipping point with his success as a writer, Murakami switched from combining maker and manager schedules to focusing on just being a maker.

In Deep Work, Cal Newport describes the schedule of another person who combines both roles, Wharton professor Adam Grant:

To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Though Grant’s productivity depends on many factors, there’s one idea in particular that seems central to his method: the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches. Grant performs this batching at multiple levels. Within the year, he stacks his teaching into the fall semester, during which he can turn all of his attention to teaching well and being available to his students. (This method seems to work, as Grant is currently the highest-rated teacher at Wharton and the winner of multiple teaching awards.)

During the fall semester, Grant is in manager mode and has meetings with students. For someone in a teaching role, a maker schedule would be impossible. Teachers need to be able to help and advise their students. In the spring and summer, Grant switches to a maker schedule to focus on his research. He avoids distractions by being — at least, in his mind — out of his office.

Within a semester dedicated to research, he alternates between periods where his door is open ..., and periods where he isolates himself to focus completely and without distraction on a single research task. (He typically divides the writing of a scholarly paper into three discrete tasks: analyzing the data, writing a full draft, and editing the draft into something publishable.) During these periods, which can last up to three or four days, he’ll often put an out-of-office auto-responder on his e-mail so correspondents will know not to expect a response. “It sometimes confuses my colleagues,” he told me. “They say, ‘You’re not out of office, I see you in your office right now!’” But to Grant, it’s important to enforce strict isolation until he completes the task at hand.

The Value of Defining Your Schedule

We know routine’s benefits – working smarter, health, planning, and achieving goals. That’s been discussed endlessly. But how often do we consider how our days are actually segmented, how we choose (or are forced) to break them up?

If you’re a maker, do you structure your day around long blocks of focus, or is it chopped into slices others can grab? If you’re a manager, are you available when needed? Do your meetings have purpose and leverage, or are you just filling an appointment book? If you do both, how do you draw and communicate that boundary?

Cal Newport writes:

We spend much of our days on autopilot—not giving much thought to what we are doing with our time. This is a problem. It’s difficult to prevent the trivial from creeping into every corner of your schedule if you don’t face, without flinching, your current balance between deep and shallow work, and then adopt the habit of pausing before action and asking, “What makes the most sense right now?”

The maker/manager schedule distinction matters for two key reasons.

First, defining the schedule we need is more important than worrying about task management or habits. Trying to do maker work on a manager schedule or vice versa leads to problems. Second, we must be aware of the schedules of those around us to be considerate and let them do their best work.

Neither type of work is superior; they’re interdependent. Managers would be useless without makers and makers would be frustrated without managers. Graham notes that managers can damage employees’ productivity by failing to recognize the distinction. Those who do will be ahead.

Each type of schedule works fine by itself. Problems arise when they meet. Since most powerful people operate on the manager’s schedule, they’re in a position to make everyone resonate at their frequency if they want to. But the smarter ones restrain themselves, if they know that some of the people working for them need long chunks of time to work in.

Makers generally avoid meetings and commitments that don’t directly impact their work. For them, it’s not the visible impact that matters, but the invisible. A 30-minute meeting doesn’t just take half an hour. It bisects the day, creating serious problems.

Say a programmer has an 11 am meeting. When they start in the morning, they know they must stop later, preventing full immersion. At 11am, they must pause, even at a crucial stage, and attend the meeting.

When makers finally return to real work, they experience attention residue and switching costs. It takes 15-20 minutes to regain focus. The single 30-minute meeting has devoured at least an hour but likely more. And, of course, few people have just one meeting. The reality is they are sprinkled throughout the day.

Software entrepreneur Ray Ozzie has a specific technique for handling potential interruptions — the four-hour rule. When he’s working on a product, he never starts unless he has at least four uninterrupted hours to focus on it. Small blocks of time, he discovered, resulted in more bugs, which later required fixing.

In Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain describes an experiment to figure out the characteristics of superior programmers:

...more than six hundred developers from ninety-two different companies participated. Each designed, coded, and tested a program, working in his normal office space during business hours. Each participant was also assigned a partner from the same company. The partners worked separately, however, without any communication, a feature of the games that turned out to be critical.

When the results came in, they revealed an enormous performance gap. The best outperformed the worst by a 10:1 ratio. The top programmers were also about 2.5 times better than the median. When DeMarco and Lister tried to figure out what accounted for this astonishing range, the factors that you’d think would matter—such as years of experience, salary, even the time spent completing the work—had little correlation to outcome. Programmers with ten years’ experience did no better than those with two years. The half who performed above the median earned less than 10 percent more than the half below—even though they were almost twice as good. The programmers who turned in “zero-defect” work took slightly less, not more, time to complete the exercise than those who made mistakes.

It was a mystery with one intriguing clue: programmers from the same companies performed at more or less the same level, even though they hadn’t worked together. That’s because top performers overwhelmingly worked for companies that gave their workers the most privacy, personal space, control over their physical environments, and freedom from interruption. Sixty-two percent of the best performers said that their workspace was acceptably private, compared to only 19 percent of the worst performers; 76 percent of the worst performers but only 38 percent of the top performers said that people often interrupted them needlessly.

A common argument makers hear from people on a different schedule is that they should “just take a break for this!” — “this” being a meeting, coffee, and so on. However, a distinction exists between time spent not doing their immediate work and taking a break.

Pausing to go for a walk is a break that recharges makers and helps them focus better when they return to work. A solo walk or run is one of the ways I figure out tricky parts of writing or discover new ideas.

Pausing to hear about a coworker’s marital problems or the company’s predictions for the next quarter has the opposite effect.

A break and time spent not working are very different. One fosters focus, and the other snaps it.