Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule

Paul Graham’s (of YCombinator fame) essay on the difference between the Maker’s Schedule and the Manager’s Schedule is a timeless piece of advice that is sadly not as well known as it should be. The essay provides an interesting, if not logical reason behind why programmer’s skip meetings called by managers, while managers often tend to interrupt programmers.

Here are some of the important points in his essay:

Speaking of interruptions (see what I did there? :P) there had been a number of studies (both anecdotal and scientifically validated) that enormous productivity loss of interruptions.

As a maker, how do you explain to your colleagues/friends/significant others that you’re not being rude for ignoring or telling them away when they interrupt you? One way could be through an analogy: sleep.

Another way of explaining would be to let the other person experience what you’re experiencing during an interruption.

What do we do at Mindvalley to help mitigate these concerns?

HipChat and channels (or any asynchronous mode of communication)–because the communication is asynchronous, the other party is not required to immediately respond to a question or a request, and gives the the other person the choice of answering you in their own time. The popping icon is really distracting so we need to turn that off as well

Further reading:

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