Maker's Schedule vs Manager's Schedule: How Meetings Wreck Your Day
In this 2009 classic, Paul Graham distinguishes two schedule types: the manager’s schedule, cut into one-hour slots, and the maker’s schedule, which requires long, uninterrupted half-day blocks. Meetings destroy a maker’s productivity—they fragment afternoons and throw an exception into deep work. Graham shares personal tricks, like coding late at night and grouping all business tasks in the morning, and explains how Y Combinator uses clustered office hours at day’s end to protect maker time. He notes the high cost of speculative meetings and asks managers to recognize the maker’s needs. Although anecdotal, the essay resonates with engineers who need focused time for complex tasks.
July 2009
One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.
There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule.
2009年7月
程序员如此讨厌会议的一个原因是，他们的日程类型与其他人不同。会议让他们付出更多代价。
有两种日程类型，我称之为经理日程和创造者日程。
The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you're doing every hour.
When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you're done.
Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command.
经理日程是为老板们准备的。它体现在传统的预约簿中，每天被切割成一小时的间隔。如果需要，你可以为单个任务预留几个小时，但默认情况下你每小时都会切换所做的事情。
当你这样使用时间时，与某人会面只是一个实操问题。在你的日程中找到一个空档，预约他们，就搞定了。
大多数有权势的人都在经理日程上。这是命令的日程。
But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.
但还有另一种使用时间的方式，在创造东西的人（如程序员和作家）中很常见。他们通常更喜欢以至少半天为单位来使用时间。你无法在以小时为单位的时间里写好文章或程序。那点时间几乎只够开始。
When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.
For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.
I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there's sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I'm slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you're a maker, think of your own case. 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. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.
当你在创造者日程上运作时，会议就是一场灾难。单单一个会议就能毁掉整个下午，将其分成两段，每一段都太短而无法做任何困难的事。此外，你还得记住开会这件事。对于经理日程上的人来说，这根本不是问题。下一小时总有事要做；唯一的问题是什么事。但当一个创造者日程上的人有一个会议时，他们必须惦记着它。
对于创造者日程上的人来说，开会就像抛出一个异常。它不仅会让你从一个任务切换到另一个任务，还会改变你的工作模式。
我发现一个会议有时会影响一整天。一个会议通常会毁掉至少半天，破坏一个上午或下午。但除此之外，有时还会产生级联效应。如果我知道下午会被打断，我上午就不太可能开始什么有野心的项目。我知道这听起来可能有点敏感，但如果你是创造者，想想你自己的情况。想到一整天自由工作、没有任何约会，你的精神难道不会振奋吗？那么，当没有这种自由时，你的精神就会相应地低落。而有野心的项目，按定义就是接近你能力极限的。士气小幅下降就足以扼杀它们。
Each type of schedule works fine by itself. Problems arise when they meet. Since most powerful people operate on the manager's schedule, they're in a position to make everyone resonate at their frequency if they want to. But the smarter ones restrain themselves, if they know that some of the people working for them need long chunks of time to work in.
Our case is an unusual one. Nearly all investors, including all VCs I know, operate on the manager's schedule. But Y Combinator runs on the maker's schedule. Rtm and Trevor and I do because we always have, and Jessica does too, mostly, because she's gotten into sync with us.
I wouldn't be surprised if there start to be more companies like us. I suspect founders may increasingly be able to resist, or at least postpone, turning into managers, just as a few decades ago they started to be able to resist switching from jeans to suits.
每种日程类型单独运作都很好。问题出现在它们相遇时。由于大多数有权势的人在经理日程上运作，他们有能力让所有人都以他们的频率共振，如果他们想的话。但更聪明的人会自我克制，如果他们知道有些为他们工作的人需要大块时间工作。
我们的情况比较特殊。几乎所有投资者，包括我认识的所有风投，都采用经理日程。但Y Combinator采用创造者日程。Rtm、Trevor和我这么做是因为我们一直如此，Jessica也大部分如此，因为她已经与我们同步了。
如果开始有更多像我们这样的公司，我不会感到惊讶。我怀疑创始人可能越来越能够抵抗（或至少推迟）变成经理，就像几十年前他们开始能够抵抗从牛仔裤换成西装一样。
How do we manage to advise so many startups on the maker's schedule? By using the classic device for simulating the manager's schedule within the maker's: office hours. Several times a week I set aside a chunk of time to meet founders we've funded. These chunks of time are at the end of my working day, and I wrote a signup program that ensures all the appointments within a given set of office hours are clustered at the end. Because they come at the end of my day these meetings are never an interruption. (Unless their working day ends at the same time as mine, the meeting presumably interrupts theirs, but since they made the appointment it must be worth it to them.) During busy periods, office hours sometimes get long enough that they compress the day, but they never interrupt it.
我们如何在创造者日程上为这么多初创公司提供建议？通过使用一个经典方法，在创造者日程内模拟经理日程：办公室时间。每周几次，我会留出一大块时间与我们已经资助的创始人会面。这些时间段在我的工作日结束时，我写了一个注册程序，确保给定办公室时间内的所有预约都集中在末尾。因为它们在我一天的末尾，这些会议永远不会造成中断。（除非他们的工作日与我在同一时间结束，那么会议可能会中断他们的一天，但既然他们预约了，那对他们来说一定值得。）在忙碌时期，办公室时间有时会变得很长，以至于压缩了白天的时间，但它们从不中断白天的工作。
When we were working on our own startup, back in the 90s, I evolved another trick for partitioning the day. I used to program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then I'd sleep till about 11 am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called "business stuff." I never thought of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day, one on the manager's schedule and one on the maker's.
上世纪90年代我们在做自己的创业公司时，我演化出另一个分割一天的小技巧。我每天从晚饭后编程到凌晨3点左右，因为晚上没人能打扰我。然后我睡到大约上午11点，来上班后处理我所谓的“商务事务”，一直工作到晚餐时间。我从未这样想过，但实际上我每天有两个工作日：一个在经理日程上，一个在创造者日程上。
When you're operating on the manager's schedule you can do something you'd never want to do on the maker's: you can have speculative meetings. You can meet someone just to get to know one another. If you have an empty slot in your schedule, why not? Maybe it will turn out you can help one another in some way.
Business people in Silicon Valley (and the whole world, for that matter) have speculative meetings all the time. They're effectively free if you're on the manager's schedule. They're so common that there's distinctive language for proposing them: saying that you want to "grab coffee," for example.
Speculative meetings are terribly costly if you're on the maker's schedule, though. Which puts us in something of a bind. Everyone assumes that, like other investors, we run on the manager's schedule. So they introduce us to someone they think we ought to meet, or send us an email proposing we grab coffee. At this point we have two options, neither of them good: we can meet with them, and lose half a day's work; or we can try to avoid meeting them, and probably offend them.
当你在经理日程上运作时，你可以做一些你绝不想在创造者日程上做的事：你可以安排投机性会议。你可以只是为了认识某人而见面。如果你的日程中有空档，为什么不呢？也许最终你们能以某种方式互相帮助。
硅谷（乃至全世界）的商业人士一直在安排投机性会议。如果你在经理日程上，它们实际上是免费的。它们如此常见，以至于有独特的语言来提议：例如，说你想“一起喝杯咖啡”。
然而，如果你在创造者日程上，投机性会议就极其昂贵。这让我们陷入困境。每个人都以为我们和其他投资者一样，按经理日程运作。所以他们介绍我们认为应该认识的人，或者发邮件提议喝杯咖啡。这时我们有两个选择，都不好：要么见面，损失半天工作；要么试图避免见面，很可能得罪人。
Till recently we weren't clear in our own minds about the source of the problem. We just took it for granted that we had to either blow our schedules or offend people. But now that I've realized what's going on, perhaps there's a third option: to write something explaining the two types of schedule. Maybe eventually, if the conflict between the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule starts to be more widely understood, it will become less of a problem.
Those of us on the maker's schedule are willing to compromise. We know we have to have some number of meetings. All we ask from those on the manager's schedule is that they understand the cost.
Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
直到最近，我们自己也并不清楚问题的根源。我们只是理所当然地认为，要么破坏日程，要么得罪人。但现在我明白了是怎么回事，也许有第三种选择：写些东西解释这两种日程。也许最终，如果经理日程和创造者日程之间的冲突得到更广泛的理解，它就不会成为那么大的问题了。
我们这些处于创造者日程上的人愿意妥协。我们知道必须有一定数量的会议。我们对经理日程上的人唯一的要求是，他们理解这种代价。
感谢 Sam Altman、Trevor Blackwell、Paul Buchheit、Jessica Livingston 和 Robert Morris 阅读本文的草稿。