Maker's and manager's schedule

I believe understanding maker’s vs. manager’s schedule is extremely valuable for engineers. Time allocation in is one of the biggest challenges in tech.

Both on a personal and a wider level.

If you’re not in control of your schedule, you’re not in control of your career. This is non-negotiable. There’s no significant progress without substantial time investment directed with intentionality.

Tldr; maker’s schedule are large blocks of uninterrupted time, while manager’s schedule are many smaller slots dedicated to different priorities. Read the full essay here.

Most of the engineers are on maker’s schedule, so I’ll focus my attention on that segment. This is the first thing we need to internalize.

We build, we create, we think deeply about hard problems. Remember that beautiful flow state. You don’t get to that place in 15 minutes after your third meeting that day.

You need a large block, because this is the only way to create an opportunity for productivity. When you deeply understand this, and you make sure your manager does as well, you’re on your way.

Biggest schedule breakers are meetings. Find ways to exclude yourself from meetings where you’re not needed. Find ways to group meetings into blocks. Find ways to shift meetings to specific days. There’s always some wiggle room to make your schedule more aligned with your needs.

This is your external schedule. Find ways to manage your internal schedule as well. How do you spend your blocks of time once you have them? Where do you waste time often? What kicks you out of creating?

For me personally it was a variety of things. Broken CI pipelines that take 40 minutes to run. Listening to music through YouTube, wanting to skip an add and then starting to read recommended videos.

There’s more. Not using large blocks for deep work, but splitting across more different projects. Trying to solve difficult problems after a long day’s work. Frequently checking my Slack notifications. Not having my personal phone on do-not-disturb.

Once you start looking for it, you’ll find plenty. But you’re not hopeless, you can help yourself.

Understand why it matters, find ways to help yourself, and achieve significantly more in the same amount of time.