by @abhia90 // newsletter // youtube

<aside> ⭐ Link to Paul Graham's article here

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

Managers schedule

• Traditional 1 hour blocks that you can use as you see fit
• Most powerful ppl are on this 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.

Maker's schedule

• Ex: programmers, writers
• Prefer to use time in units of half a day at least (b/c it's hard to create well in units of an hour...it's not enough time to get started)
• Meetings (either team or speculative meetings) = 💀for Makers
  • can take forever, or worse, they can interrupt your creative process either by 1) actually taking away time or by 2) producing a cascading effect (ex: "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."). Remember: "ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off."
  • For makers, having a meeting isn't only destructive, it's requiring them to switch the mode in which they work (from maker —> manager)
  • "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. 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."

Potential Solution: Office Hours

• Can chunk this time at the end of the day, use a signup sheet, this ensures all meetings are clustered together back to back.

<aside> ⭐ All information is owned by Y Combinator. I claim no ownership of this information.

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by @abhia90 // newsletter // youtube