3 practical ways to get to a maker schedule when you work with other people
I spent a few years of my life in a futile campaign for ‘Meetingless Mondays.’ That didn’t work, so I had to settle for sending colleagues ‘This meeting should have been an email’ memes at regular intervals.
But it’s something I still thought was worth fighting for and so I felt vindicated to find an actual, official, named concept that other, more credible people than me agreed with: maker schedules and manager schedules.
Everyone gets this concept instantly because it just fits with most people’s experience of work. ‘Makers’ (writers, designers, coders, engineers) need large blocks of uninterrupted time so that they can concentrate or do ‘deep work’. Managers, on the other hand tend to have days filled with calls, (rarely productive) meetings, ‘quick catch-ups’, emails, and ‘fire-fighting’ —things that require them to shift quickly from one thing to another.
Here’s the original, classic article by Paul Graham:
Everyone can agree that meetings and interrupted schedules are not very conducive to focused, intense work. And most people find meetings irritating, disruptive (and not in the way people try to be disruptive nowadays), and generally unproductive. So maker and manager schedules just make sense.
Using these schedules sounds simple (and there are hundreds of articles on tips to organize your week for a maker schedule).
However
However, most of these forget or ignore the one factor that derails most individual attempts to set a maker schedule: other people. And, well, the company culture in general. Because it’s all very well to block your own time on your calendar to work on a project, but if your boss or your team doesn’t really buy into the concept, you’re likely to be interrupted by emails, requests for ‘quick chats’ and ‘just-wanted-your-input-on-that’, or, even more irritating, by people coordinating to set up meetings for later.
What can you do?
If you’ve ever kind of wanted to do this but kept running into obstacles (aka, other people’s schedules), here are your options.
Just ask
Perhaps your colleagues will see the logic of this and agree. Or perhaps the crushing weight of a company culture that venerates busyness and managers who are constantly shooting emails will smother the attempt before it gets off the ground.
Be a jerk
Another way is to set your schedule, turn off notifications, and refuse to respond to anything until you’re done. This may take some time, but eventually, your colleagues may accept that you work that way and even admire it. This, however, probably won’t work for long if other people’s projects get delayed frequently. You might become a convenient scapegoat for things that go wrong. Who am I kidding? Chances are people will hate you. However, instead of going it alone, you can…
Proselytize
Try to get your team or others who work with you to see the beauty of maker schedules (manager schedules are usually the default anyway). But be subtle about it.
If you’re too evangelical, they might see it as just another quirky-named business fad that someone wants to ‘implement’. So start slow.
Bring it up in casual conversations.
If they show interest, follow up by sending them an article about it.
Mention how you’re thinking of trying it, maybe for a couple of weeks. Perhaps someone else will be willing to try, too.
Perhaps you can get your immediate team or colleagues to start with a meetingless half day a week. No meetings. No emails. No interruptions. Just half a day of focused work.
Slowly extend this to a day, then two, then three.
Slowly this will spread like a beneficial virus throughout the company, and then to other companies, and then the WORLD!!!
We can do this!!!
(I mean, if you want to. Not like I care about this much.)
Check out the very insightful table halfway through this article: