Manager's schedule v/s Maker's schedule v/s Crisis manager schedule

Manager’s Schedule (Operational Work)

Who: Executives, team leads, project managers, etc.
Needs: Structured in hour-long (or shorter) blocks.
Why: Their job revolves around meetings, quick decisions, and checking in with multiple people or teams.

• Works well in hourly segments.

• Interruption is expected and often necessary.

• Productivity is measured by decisions, oversight, and communication.

Example: A manager has a day filled with 6–8 different 30- to 60-minute meetings.

Maker’s Schedule (Creative Work)

Who: Writers, developers, designers, engineers, etc.
Needs: Large blocks of uninterrupted time.
Why: Deep, focused work requires mental immersion. Even a short meeting can break the flow and ruin productivity.

• Works best in half-day or full-day chunks.

• Interruptions are costly.

• Productivity increases with long, quiet focus time.

Example: A software engineer spends 3-4 hours coding uninterrupted.

The Conflict

When a manager books a mid-day meeting with a maker, they may see it as a small ask—but for the maker, it can destroy a full block of creative work.

Here is a beautiful article here on this by the originator of this idea, Paul Graham of Y Combinator:
https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

I got to know about this concept from an entrepreneur's perspective from Hormozi:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIRkQQHzsxI

After understanding this, I am less confused about my priorities and more in tune with the needs of the organisation in my roles as both a manager and a maker.

Interestingly though, there is a third role: A Crisis Manager's schedule.

As a crisis manager, they don't know when what error, mistake or disaster is going to take place due to insufficient knowledge, oversight, lack of application of mind, communication errors, misunderstandings of the staff.

The crisis manager's role would be 2 fold: To prevent crises and solve the crises.

A crises prevention can be a non-time consuming to have a look at something and tell someone to take care of some aspect to prevent the problem or it could be time-consuming to create processes / formulae, and policies and then advice the staff multiple times so that they imbibe it.

Solving the crisis usually costs more in case of making a new one, but the lack of time is a major constraint to do that and we need to find innovative and out of the box solutions to solve these.

A crisis manager has to be a technical person who understands the in and outs of things to look a potential solutions and make sure and guarantee that the solution would finally work.

Having these 3 schedules creates a lot of internal conflicts in planning.

Especially the crisis v/s the manager's schedule of a meeting. The maker's schedule is usually put in the back seat but as an enterpreneur, it makes sense to use the crises to use the solutions for more long term and make it a part maker's schedule by making the processes/formulae.

2 mangoes with 1 stone

It is intuitive that China supporting Pakistan militarily is bad for India.

But, this problem can also be viewed as an opportunity from a counter-intuitive point of view.

War and weapons is a continuous cat and mouse game. The one with superior strategies, weapons, technologies, tactics and coordination will win any day.

By engaging and dominating the Pakistan armed forces which use a lot of Chinese weaponry, India has learnt and needs to overpower specific weapons and their features/ advantages.

For example, if one particular weapon like Beyond Visual Range (BVR) air to air missile has a 100km range, India only needs to arm itself to a better range than 100 km to make the enemy weapon ineffective in an air to air combat.

If it has a 50 km Howitzer, we need to have a 60 km Howitzer to not enable it to come in range at all (unless already deployed).

This way, we can choose to make / procure weapons with better features that can beat the all in one competitor (Chinese weapons) rather than trying to dominate over 4 different countries' different weapons and their systems.

Will India negotiate PoK from Pakistan?

Strategies in war are not clear upfront. The winner usually uses an element of surprise (timing, new paths, new technologies, new combinations, new allies, new fronts) that the enemy has not thought of or prepared for.

Similarly, a few statements now and then my the Indian establishment didn't reveal the strategy till substantial dots are there to make sense of the pattern.

The few dots:
1. Indus Water Treaty being suspended, (not cancelled)

2. "Picture toh abhi baaki hai", tweet from Former Chief of Army Staff Naravane after the initial night strike of the 9 terrorist camps.

3. Today's message from PM "Talks would on terrorism and PoK"

Can we now link these three points and see the pattern emerging?
India would resume the Indus Water Treaty only when Pakistan gives back Pakistan occupied Kashmir.

Is this what we are looking at or aiming at?

If so, this is very thoughtful, strategic and absolutely amazing!

Ideal vision of Companies

No company should try to make temporary solutions to prolong the problem indefinitely and keep making money on solving the temporary problems.

For example, there are a number electrical and electronic companies brought in "planned obsolescence" to bring down the number of hrs of usage of products so that the customer keeps rebuying the new version of the products to replace the old ones. One such company is Apple.

But, at the other end of the spectrum, there are many companies that are into sustainability and try to repair or replace parts to enhance the longevity of the products.

I am yet to come across a pharma company with an ideal vision.

A pharma company's vision and mission should ideally be "To eradicate the problem of _____"

Fill in the blank of what it is it that you want to solve the problem fully.

And once that problem is solved, the division or the company should shut down or change its vision to eradicate another problem.

From chicken's neck into a full chicken

India is not in the best of places - Geography wise.

It always had 2 aggressive nations on either side of the north - Pakistan and China.

Now, after the ouster of the democratically elected govt in 2024, Bangladesh is now siding with Pakistan to open a third front for India to deal with.

If a close aide of the interim chief advisor should talk of Bangladesh and China taking the 7 north east states of India by the chicken's neck of 22 km, India should plan of actually capturing the 100 km of straight route directly to Meghalaya and dividing Bangladesh into 2 and no longer allowing a chicken's neck to be there, but make it the whole of the chicken.