Olimova Mohinur

Makers need focus time. 

A Manager’s schedule is pretty easy to understand: you 

have discrete blocks of time, often 30-60 minutes at a time 

where you are largely in meetings or doing small tasks like 

emailing, or editing a presentation. 

Meanwhile, Maker schedules are quite different. Paul 

Graham, co-founder of startup accelerator Y Combinator, 

describes it well in his essay, “Maker’s schedule, Manager’s 

schedule”: 

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. 

…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.“ 

That “quick call for the team to sync up” may seem easy to 

add to your schedule, but if you schedule it at the wrong 

time you may be sabotaging the productivity of your entire 

team. 

Any type of deep, creative work requires sustained focus 

for multiple, uninterrupted hours. It takes time to warm 

---

up and focus your mind on the task and really “get in the 

zone.” 

With COVID quarantine, it can be already much harder to 

get into that focus for any number of reasons. This makes 

it all the more damaging if you interrupt their best time for 

focused work. 

To maximize your team’s maker hours despite being 

remote: 



 

Minimize the total number of meetings you ask them 

to attend. 



 

Provide updates, notes, and details for meetings they 

may want to be updated on and don’t need to attend. 



 

Schedule meetings they do need to attend outside of 

their largest blocks of uninterrupted work time. 

With these small tweaks and a little planning ahead to 

accommodate maker hours, you can dramatically improve 

the productivity and quality of the work of many on your 

team. 

Further reading for improving your remote 

meetings: 

1. More advice on effective asynchronous 

communication from an experienced remote worker 

2. 3 Keys to Helping Your Team Transition to Remote 

Work Well 

3. 11 Essential Tips for Effectively Managing Remote 

Employees