Managers vs. Makers, Scheduling, and Making the Workplace Work

I love it when people smarter and more experienced than me articulate thoughts I haven’t been able to fully get out. You should go read the whole article.

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. [But] people who make things, like programmers and writers…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.
— Paul Graham, The Maker’s Schedule

I can’t begin to detail the number of times I’ve left the office at the end of the workday thinking, “why didn’t I get anything accomplished today?” I’m beginning to realize it has everything to do with my calendar and what lies between the 9–5. Meetings wreck me. Silly, but also true. 

Of course, as wrecking as they are, meetings are necessary. Not all of them, but at least some of them. We can make them better, more valuable meetings, but they’re still on the calendar, chopping the maker’s workday into useless chunks of an hour here, 30 minutes there, 45 minutes in-between lunch and the dreaded meeting you know will last until the end of the day.

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.
— ibid.

If your manager is good at their job and realize the differences/function of all the people on their team, the workplace can be very friendly to the makers of the world. There’s always tension, there are always meetings, but the more we can articulate the environment we need to get stuff done, to make, the more the managers of the world can help protect it. Then they’re creating consistent wins for their team by cultivating productivity. 

And what manager doesn’t want that?