In 2009, the programmer and investor Paul Graham wrote a short essay that explains a lot of workplace friction. Managers, he said, work on a manager's schedule: the day is cut into one-hour slots, and a meeting is just a matter of finding a free one. Makers, people who write, design, code or build, work on a maker's schedule: they need half a day or more at a stretch, and a single meeting can wreck it.
Why one meeting costs a maker an afternoon
For a manager, a meeting at 2 PM costs an hour. For a maker it can cost the whole afternoon, because it splits the time into two pieces too short to start anything hard. Before the meeting there's no point getting deep into a problem you'll have to drop; after it, you need time to get back in. Graham's line was that a meeting for a maker is like throwing an exception: it doesn't just take its own time, it changes the mode you're in.
Research on interruptions backs this up. Gloria Mark found that people took about 23 minutes on average to get back to an interrupted task, and Sophie Leroy showed that thoughts about an unfinished task linger, degrading whatever comes next. Our post on the cost of context switching goes through the studies.
What it costs a team
A weekly one-hour meeting of six people on $90,000 salaries costs around $23,344 a year, once you add overheads and the time each person needs to get back to work afterwards. Run your own numbers in the meeting cost calculator. The salary is the visible cost; the deep work that doesn't happen around the meeting is the bigger one.
How teams make both schedules work
- Meeting blocks. Put all meetings in one part of the day, usually the afternoon, and leave mornings for makers. Graham himself held office hours at the end of the day.
- No-meeting days. Many companies keep one or two days a week free of internal meetings entirely.
- Default to writing. Status updates, FYIs and many decisions work better as a short written note than a meeting.
- Shorter defaults. 25 and 50 minutes instead of 30 and 60, with an agenda and a decision to make.
- Calendar honesty. Makers should block their focus time in the shared calendar, so it looks as busy as it is.
Distributed teams have it harder, because the shared hours are few. The meeting planner finds them, and our guide to scheduling across time zones covers the rest.
If you're a maker with a manager's calendar
- Block two mornings a week as “focus” and treat them as meetings with yourself.
- Offer specific alternative slots when someone books over them.
- Cluster the meetings you can't avoid back to back.
- Use the gaps under an hour for shallow work: email, reviews, small fixes.
Book the maker's half-day
Flight turns a block of focus into a real flight. A maker's morning is a long-haul: pick somewhere four hours away, take off, and land at lunch with the work done.