2X Your Productivity With a Maker Schedule
This is part of my blog series Practical Self-Help for Introspective People.
Don't your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all?
Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don't.
— Paul Graham, Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
What do painters, playwrights, and programmers have in common? They use their talents and expertise to create new things, to make things that didn’t exist before. They’re makers.
But making is hard work. In addition to skill, it requires dedicated focus for sustained periods. Any interruption can break our flow and throw us off our groove. As such, our best work only happens when we work without disruptions. Without distractions.
That’s why we need a Maker Schedule.
Maker Schedule
The idea is simple: block out periods of “focus time” on your calendar. These periods last at least two hours though four hours (or more) is ideal.
Early in my career, I watched a talented programmer work this way. He’d disappear for two days to work on a new feature or build a proof of concept. I thought he was crazy for just disappearing or “going rogue,” as we called it. He skipped so many meetings and wasn’t available to answer anybody’s questions! But he got more done in two days than I did in two weeks.
Contrast this with the Manager Schedule, where you have meetings every hour. Or half-hour. (Supposedly, Elon Musk has meetings every 15 minutes!) When our focus is constantly shifting, how can we get anything done?
Typical work day
Unfortunately, the Manager Schedule is our default mode. It slices up our day into small chunks interspersed with meetings. This works well for executives and managers, so they assumed it works well for everyone else.
But it doesn't.
As a result, makers seldom get two hours of focus time. And we never get half a day to work without interruptions. Instead, our days are littered with random meetings and wasted time between those meetings.
A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.
— Paul Graham, Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
Is it any wonder that so many makers are frustrated with their jobs?
Let’s be productive
You can probably guess which schedule is better for people who need to focus. But can you guess how much better? Is it 5% or 5X?
It’s as high as 5X.
For example, before remote working was commonplace, my teammate Bob worked from 7 am to 11 am in his secret “den of productivity.” None of us knew where he was during these hours, and he ignored emails, chats, and texts. (He’d answer his phone in an emergency.)
During a single 4-hour stretch, Bob was wildly productive. He shipped more code than he did in a week’s worth of afternoons at the office. He was 5X more productive in his “den of productivity.”
Let’s be realistic
As much as we’d love a day without meetings, it’s just not a reasonable expectation. Meetings have to happen. (Well, at least some of them do.)
So a 5X productivity boost is not reasonable for many of us. But we can double our productivity if we cluster meetings together and schedule 2-hour blocks of focus time.
In addition, schedule an hour each day for Office Hours. Like with college professors, during Office Hours, people can drop in, ask questions, and have short impromptu meetings. This way, you support your coworkers without interrupting your focus time.
Note: if many people rely on your expertise, you may need Office Hours in the morning and the afternoon.
Take Action
It’s not enough to know the right things. You have to do something with this knowledge. You have to change your behavior, even if it’s a tiny change.
So if you’re a maker of any sort, whether a painter, playwright, or programmer, move toward a Maker Schedule. Schedule a 2-hour block of focus time for today. And a block for tomorrow. In fact, do this for every day in the next week. Even if you don’t know exactly how you’ll use that time, schedule it. You’re a maker. You need all the focus time you can get.
Ideally, these blocks will recur at the same time every week. But that may not be reasonable in the beginning. Just start small, and over time, work toward this ideal.
Lastly, keep the commitments you make to yourself. Unless there’s an emergency, don’t allow people to schedule over your focus time. Silence your phone and mute Slack. Don’t pay any heed to people’s requests for your attention.
Others can wait.