What if my job requires both making and managing?

Most senior individual contributors and first-time managers operate in both modes. The practical approach is to batch manager activities (meetings, email, reviews) in the afternoon and protect mornings for maker work. Even partial maker blocks (2 hours in the morning) significantly outperform fully fragmented schedules.

How do I communicate my schedule preference to my team?

Transparency works better than passive calendar blocking. Explain that you do your best work in uninterrupted morning sessions and ask for afternoon meetings where possible. Most teams accommodate this when the reasoning is shared, especially if you remain reliably available for urgent issues.

Is the maker/manager distinction relevant for remote workers?

Especially relevant. Remote work environments create more meeting fragmentation (video calls are easier to schedule) while also offering more control over schedule design. Remote makers have more opportunity to implement maker schedules but also more meetings to fight against.

Does the maker/manager schedule apply outside tech?

Yes. Lawyers writing briefs, scientists running experiments, academics researching and writing, designers creating deliverables — all have maker work that requires extended uninterrupted periods. The specific work type is less important than the requirement for sustained concentration.

Maker schedule vs. manager schedule: the distinction that explains why meetings destroy creative work

Paul Graham's maker/manager schedule framework explains why the same meeting that's routine for a manager is catastrophic for a maker. Learn how to protect your maker time.

What are the maker and manager schedules?

Paul Graham introduced the maker/manager distinction in a 2009 essay. The manager schedule divides the day into one-hour blocks, each of which can hold a meeting. Managers can meet, handle email, make decisions, and coordinate effectively in this structure — the work itself consists of information exchange and decision-making, which fits naturally into hour-long windows. The maker schedule requires half-day minimum blocks. Makers — writers, programmers, designers, researchers — need extended periods of uninterrupted time to produce high-quality output. A single meeting in the middle of the day effectively destroys both halves of the maker's day by preventing the long concentration arc that creative work requires.

Why a single meeting can ruin a maker's entire day

For a manager, a 2pm meeting is a routine calendar event in a day full of them. For a software engineer writing complex code, a 2pm meeting cuts the workday in half. The morning half is finite — they know the meeting is coming, which creates a psychological constraint: 'I have to stop by 1:45, so I shouldn't start anything complex.' The afternoon half is spent recovering from the context switch and waiting for the next meeting. The result is that a single hour-long meeting costs 3–4 hours of productive output. Graham argues this isn't a time management problem — it's a structural incompatibility between two different work modes sharing the same calendar.

How knowledge workers can work across both schedules

Many knowledge workers operate across both modes: they need maker time for technical or creative output and manager time for coordination, decisions, and communication. The sustainable strategy is not to eliminate meetings but to cluster them. Meetings in morning and maker time in afternoon (or vice versa) produces better results than alternating meeting and focus blocks throughout the day. Some companies implement 'no-meeting Wednesdays' or 'maker mornings' as cultural norms. Individual approaches include meeting-free morning calendars, asynchronous-first communication policies, and explicit 'protect this time' blocks that decline meeting requests automatically.

Applying the maker/manager framework to calendar design

Practically implementing a maker-schedule protection requires explicit calendar architecture. The first step is identifying your peak maker time — when in the day do you produce your best concentrated work? For most people, this is mornings. The second step is blocking that time on your calendar as 'focus time' with decline-by-default for meeting requests. The third step is designating a meeting window (typically afternoon) where collaboration happens. This doesn't eliminate meetings — it batches them to protect the maker blocks. today supports this by showing external calendar events alongside your self-created blocks, so you can see exactly where maker time exists and create focused blocks to protect it.

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