
Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule (2009) - glacials
http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
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dang
Thread from 2018:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16922147](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16922147)

2015:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10658187](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10658187)

2012:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4512023](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4512023)

2009:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=718279](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=718279)

~~~
ineedasername
Yes, but there's always new people popping up, and it's a useful concept to
keep in mind, especially if you manage "makers".

~~~
dang
Oh yes. As the other repliers explained, the intent behind linking to past
discussions is just to satisfy curiosity. Otherwise we'd mark the post [dupe]
and bury it.

I wish I could find a brief way to signify this when making such a post. It
would be tedious to spell the intention out every time, and yet without it, a
lot of readers mistakenly think that it's about shaming the submitter for
reposting; exactly the opposite of what we mean!

~~~
Normal_gaussian
I don't know what you've tried, however calling them 'archives' or 'archived
threads' may increase contrast with this thread.

Finishing with a (somewhat forced perhaps) positive note may encourage this
one eg "I'm looking forwards to today's insights".

Then again, this could just be fixating on the little problems!

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sqs
Sourcegraph CEO here. I came across a product here on HN that is helping with
the problem of being a maker at a company with meetings. It’s called Meetter
([https://www.meetter.app/](https://www.meetter.app/)) and it lets you block
off a specific hour each day/week for meetings instead of making your entire
day open to scattered meetings. I am just speaking as a happy user and
customer, I am not affiliated with them in any way.

~~~
cstrasen
I am on-and-off conversing with the team at meetter ever since we started
using it for some of our meetings. They are very responsive and helpful.

The concept is solid but it takes a cultural shift which can be hard. I am all
for less but better meetings and condensing the schedules.

If someone would ask me to describe what meetter is I would say "An automated
team assistant that tries to make sure that all topics of your org can get
focused meeting time in one or multiple big blocks"

"Good" orgs will push for a commitment that everyone is available at the
_same_ time slots, say 2 hours every Mon, Wed, Fri. Meetter (and well created
topics) will do the rest and nobody needs to juggle.

Prerequisite is having enough meeting spaces or being more remote as the
number of _parallel_ sessions (formerly called breakouts) is dynamic.

Edit: also the slack integration is great, makes creating topics a breeze and
helps transparency.

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killjoywashere
I have a similar "partition" but it's forced on me by laws of physics: I live
on a tropical island a bit less than half-way around the world. By force of
everyone else's schedule in the US, my "business time" goes from about 5 am
(about as early as I can bear to take a meeting) to about 9 am when everyone
on the west coast is wrapping up their day. Then I attend to my work in the
lab where I can sit down to the first "maker" part of my day, diagnosing
cancer under the microscope. After dinner I usually have a second "maker
period", reading papers, working through a computer science text (I never got
a formal computing education but was lucky that physics proved to be "close
enough"), planning experiments, and writing long-form business documents.

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voxmatt
We built a tool around this essay to help better coordinate across maker and
manager time: [https://www.getclockwise.com/](https://www.getclockwise.com/)

At the core, it defragments your calendar, but it also provides a suite of
utilities to help you better organize your time (color coding, Slack status,
personal calendar sync, auto travel time, etc.). PG's essay has been a
consistent point of inspiration for us.

Engineering teams at teams from 5 – 1000 use us. Give it a try and let me know
what you think.

~~~
calcsam
Thanks for building Clockwise. Our entire team uses it, and it's quite useful
for blocking off chunks of time.

The one part where we run into trouble is: we give our Calendly links a ton to
external folks to schedule meetings.

Now either we mark our Clockwise blocks as "busy" in which case it's very
difficult to schedule a meeting with us via Calendly, or "free" in which case
people can schedule meetings with us at any point during the block in which
case the block usually gets broken up.

Something that would be great is the ability to allow meetings in eg the first
45m or last 45m of a Clockwise block >2hrs long.

Whether you accomplish this by fragmenting blocks (45m free / 1 hr busy / 45m
free), or some deeper integration w/ Calendly is immaterial, but this sort of
thing would be immensely helpful!

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foobar_
This also called process orientation vs goal orientation. Goal orientation
looks good on paper but its largely a disaster. It's good to be both but err
on the side of the process. There's a reason why great mangers are
programmers. Shit managers are in it for the money or status and are likely
the types to yell out - why isn't it done yet.

It doesn't take a whole lotta imagination to come up with world-changing and
ambitious goals.

~~~
teddyh
> _This also called process orientation vs goal orientation._

A.k.a. “Goals vs. Systems”:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwcKTYvupJw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwcKTYvupJw)

~~~
foobar_
Exactly! Thanks for the link.

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myle
Deep work by Newport expands on the same idea and provides some practical tips
also. Highly recommended.

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mnky9800n
If you haven't read the book Peopleware, I recommend it. It clearly defined to
me, as a maker in Paul grahams terminology, what was and wasn't working on my
team and why.

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joelrunyon
You should really check out woven.com (calendly meets google calendar meets
doodle). One of the most under-hyped startups in the productivity space this
year.

It's been a gamechanger for blocking off parts of my calendar while creating
"templates" for different styles of meetings that are only available at
certain days/times (for example: client calls, board meetings, or coffee
meetings).

It's completely changed how I organize my time and one of the main levers for
me doubling my productivity this year.

~~~
fukuwata
Are you affiliated with woven?

