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Comment by afarrell | Hacker News Reader

Firstly: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

Secondly: Yes, people who like talking with people tend to go into careers that primarily involve talking to people.

I have never heard of this maker vs manager schedule thing before. It really resonates with me. I just finished a rotation as a primary contributor on leave from my manager role and was having a real hard time telling people I had to cancel meetings from my normal job bc I couldn’t switch mental gears like that. This link is so very true it’s scary…I had been wondering if anyone was good at doing both, and if I could exercise my brain muscles to be able to switch between the two during the day. Anyone have any luck at that? I feels really really hard.

My job involves a lot of meetings, and also doing a lot of IC work. What works for me is to take 2-3 hrs every week thinking through all the IC work I need to do and breaking it down into chunks that can be completed in 6-8 1 hour blocks of time. That’s the longest block of time I can hope to find without any interruptions. I break things down to the level that I can write the commit message for the changes I’m about to make. Then I use to time slots to make the changes.

I like this idea. Thanks!

It's hard for most if not all folks. What you can do is put cons calls in the morning, and do your IC work in the afternoon or the other way round.

The mental switch is one part of the issue, and time fragmentation is the other.

Yea, I assume it would be something like cutting the day in half. PG said to put the calls at the end of the day, so it didn't feel like an interruption. I can see how that would work; similar to what you're saying. I wonder if top-of-game CEOs and people like that are better at switching between IC and manager, or if they are just manager from day one. It seems like Elon Musk may be one of these bright people who can concurrently IC and manage.

Hard for me and hard for the author of the blog post.

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