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.
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Works well in hourly segments.
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Interruption is expected and often necessary.
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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.
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Works best in half-day or full-day chunks.
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Interruptions are costly.
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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.
