We Killed the 'Manager Schedule'—Maker Time for Everyone

Paul Graham famously wrote about the "Maker vs. Manager" schedule in 2009. Makers (developers, writers, designers) need long, uninterrupted blocks of time to build. A single meeting costs them not just the hour, but the cognitive ramp-up before and the context-switch recovery after.

Managers, on the other hand, live in a command-and-control world of 30-minute slots. They change context every half hour. For them, a meeting is just another slot.

The tragedy of modern tech companies is that as they grow, the Manager Schedule eats the Maker Schedule. We realized this was happening to us. We were hiring brilliant engineers and then peppering their calendars with "syncs," "standups," "all-hands," and "quick chats" until they couldn't code. So we killed the Manager Schedule.

The Cost of Context Switching

We looked at our calendar data. The average engineer had 2.5 hours of fragmented free time a day. But the longest continuous block was often only 45 minutes.

You cannot write complex distributed systems code in 45-minute chunks. It takes 20 minutes just to load the context into your brain—the variable names, the state flow, the edge cases. If you are interrupted at minute 40, that 20 minutes of loading time is wasted. You have to start over next time.

We were paying for clean, high-quality code, but we were creating an environment where only shallow, buggy code could be written.

But it wasn't just engineers. Our Product Managers were burning out too. They were in so many "alignment" meetings they had no time to think about the product strategy. They were becoming routers of information rather than architects of the product.

The Radical New Rules

We instituted a "Maker Schedule Default" for the entire company. Yes, even for the CEO.

1. The 1 PM - 4 PM Meeting Block

We compressed all internal synchronous collaborations into a 3-hour window in the afternoon.

• Mornings (9 AM - 1 PM): Sacred time. Deep work. No Slack expectations. No "quick questions." This is when the hard work happens.
• Afternoons (1 PM - 4 PM): Office hours, team syncs, 1:1s, unblocking discussions.
• Late Afternoons (4 PM - 5 PM): Wrap up, plan for tomorrow.

This forced us to be ruthless. You can't fit 8 hours of meetings into 3 hours. We had to decline the fluff.

2. No-Meeting Wednesdays (The "Deep Breath")

Every Wednesday is a black hole on the calendar. No internal meetings. Period.

This serves a psychological purpose. When you are drowning in tactical work on Tuesday, knowing you have an entire 8-hour block of silence on Wednesday gives you hope. It allows for "Big Projects" that require sustained focus.

3. The Async Manifesto

To make this work, we had to get better at writing. If you can't just call a meeting to explain your idea, you have to write it down.

We adopted the "Amazon Style" narrative memo (though less rigid). Before any recurring meeting is scheduled, there must be a written artifact. Most of the time, once the artifact is written and commented on in Google Docs or Notion, the meeting becomes unnecessary.

"Reading is faster than listening." A 30-minute presentation can usually be read in 5 minutes. We respected our colleagues' time by doing the work of writing clarity.

The Fight Back (and Why It Failed)

Middle management hated this initially. Their job definition was "being in the loop," and meetings were how they stayed in the loop. They felt a loss of control.

"How do I know if the team is working if I don't see them in standup at 9 AM?"

Our answer: "Look at the commits. Look at the design specs. Look at the output."

If a manager needs a meeting to know if work is happening, they are bad managers. Good managers define clear goals and check the results. This shift exposed a lot of "performative management" where people were confusing activity with productivity.

The Impact on "Urgency"

The biggest fear was: "What if the site goes down? What if there is a P0 bug?"

We defined "Urgency" strictly. If the site is down, trigger PagerDuty. That overrides all schedules. But "I have a question about this button color" is NOT urgent. "I need approval for this expense" is NOT urgent.

By raising the bar for an interruption, we lowered the baseline stress level of the company. People stopped living in a state of "fight or flight" reactivity.

The Unexpected Winners: Managers

Six months in, the biggest converts were the managers who originally resisted.

Why? Because they finally had time to be Makers too. The VP of Engineering finally wrote that architecture vision doc she had been procrastinating for a year. The Marketing Director finally built the complex attribution model spreadsheet.

We recognized that everyone has a "Maker" inside them. When you suppress the Maker mode with Manager noise, you get shallow leaders who only react to problems rather than preventing them.

Conclusion

Time is the raw material of a software company. It is non-renewable. To let anyone in the company steal 10 peoples' time for 60 minutes without a rigorous agenda is theoretical theft of $5,000 of salary.

By protecting Maker Time, we didn't just get more code. We got better code. We got happier humans. We got a quieter, more thoughtful organization.

Look at your calendar next week. Is it a tool for you to produce value, or a tool for others to steal your attention? Defend your time. It's the only asset you truly own.