"...the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day."– Charles Dickens

July 2009One 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. 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. 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.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.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.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.

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.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.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.

Paul Graham • Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule