Maker vs Manager Time
Hello!
Welcome to another week! I'm writing this before leaving for a concert in a few hours. I plan to write what I want and ask myself why I plan my posts in less time.
Time management was one of the main points of my week, thinking about how to help teams better and the work I need to tackle by myself.
Reflecting on my schedule, a few weeks ago, I needed to tackle more variety across my organization. Feeling a lack of a "theme" per week or some North Star.
Maker vs Manager
I came across this idea of "maker" vs. "manager" calendar. The basic concept is that we're generally either "making" or "managing," having both intertwined makes us ineffective because making requires long hours of focus, while managing can be like your manager who has different topics in 30min meetings.
I came back to my work and started noticing that I was trying to do "maker work," e.g., write a design document, while at the same time jumping between meetings.
Why does the difference matter?
The difference is that it takes a lot of work to try and either do coding or write a design doc, how-to guides, etc.
These activities need focus and a significant amount of time. What I tend to do during "manager" time is more around 30min meetings during the morning, project status, daily standups, 1:1s, and product meetings.
This difference should matter to management because if they're trying to build a great engineering culture. Allowing the engineers on their team to have extensive uninterrupted time will improve their output.
Split the Week, or the Day
I've started to take my calendar with more intentionality. I started by splitting my days. Since mornings are generally for management meetings, I decided to leave it like that. But for the afternoons, I started blocking large segments of time to address topics I needed to cover.
A lot of the time, it requires trying several times because people tend to put meetings during the day. Or urgent things come up, incidents, etc. As a staff engineer, you're effectively part of both worlds, maker, and manager.
Your organization might have the concept of "Maker time" or "No Meeting Fridays." You should be leveraging that, but on the other side, if your whole organization has reached that point, you should start thinking about reducing the number of meetings everyone has (which in some cases is practically impossible).
Your Turn!
How do you manage your calendar? Or the rest of the organization "manages" it? I used to let my week open because people would put meetings out of the blue daily, even with 5min heads-up. Have you thought about the distinction between maker vs manager? Do you break your calendar this way?
Let me know by replying to this email.
Happy coding!
Things I discovered in the past week
- Maker vs. Manager: How Your Schedule Can Make or Break You post from Farnam Street summarizes this concept well.
- The original post from Paul Graham.
- How to be creative (when you have no time) a newsletter with some tips about having a creative habit even when you work a full-time job, and have kids.
website | twitter | github | linkedin | mastodon | among others