the maker vs the manager

Summary

a friend of mine, another entrepreneur, argued that being a manager is the pinnacle of entrepreneurship. you stop doing the work and you cast vision and tie parties together. I disagree. I think the pinnacle is being a maker.

1. four levels as I see it. level one, solopreneur, you do everything. level two, you’ve hired people but you’re still doing fulfillment and managing the team at the same time. brutal combo. level three, you’ve handed off fulfillment and now you mostly manage people. level four, you’re a maker again, but someone else manages the people and you’re free to create. that’s the pinnacle to me.

2. the classic reference is Paul Graham’s essay Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule, written in 2009. worth reading the whole thing. summary. managers operate in one hour blocks. their default is to switch tasks every hour. meetings drop into their calendar without disrupting anything.

3. makers operate in half day or full day blocks. you can’t write, code, design, or create well in one hour units. that’s barely the warm up. a single meeting in the middle of a maker’s day blows the whole day by breaking it into two halves, neither of which is long enough to do hard work in.

4. for a maker, having a meeting is like throwing an exception in code. it doesn’t just shift the next task. it changes the mode of the day. that’s why I sound like I hate meetings. I don’t hate my team, I love the people. I hate the calendar interruption that costs me a whole creative day.

5. the practical fix is the entrepreneurial time system. free days, no work. buffer days, throw all the meetings and admin onto them. focus days, deep creation. mine right now are Monday and Friday buffer, Tuesday Wednesday Thursday focus, Saturday Sunday free. it slips when I let it. I work hard to defend it. ask yourself if you’re a maker or a manager. then design your week around the answer. try harder.

Transcript

the friend who said manager is the pinnacle

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. Hey, Jerred Moon here, welcome to the Better Human Business podcast. Today, I’m talking about makers versus managers, and the reason I want to bring this up, I had a conversation with one of my friends, another entrepreneur recently, and he was of the opinion that.

Being a manager is like the pinnacle of entrepreneurship, and I’m not talking about some low level manager. I’m talking about the fact that you aren’t really doing a lot of work anymore. You’re just managing people. So you’re telling people what to do, you’re casting the vision and you’re tying parties together. That’s what you’re doing.

And he was making the case that, like I said, is the pinnacle, like where you want to get to. That’s the goal. Not a lot of work to do in a sense of jamming on a keyboard or, say, recording a podcast or anything like that. It’s more just you’re the manager, like you are making sure everything works.

And I am not of that opinion. Now, I do think that’s a high level of entrepreneurship, but I actually don’t think that’s the pinnacle. I think that you start as a solopreneur, you’re doing everything that you possibly can by yourself. OK, so there’s just you. Then eventually you graduate from solopreneur till you’ve hired people.

And now you’re trying to do this combination of doing the thing that you love, whatever your passion is, the reason you started the business, plus managing people. And that’s a difficult one, a difficult situation because you’re doing the work that has to get done. You’re fulfilling, you’re doing all those things, and then you still have a team to lead and manage.

four levels of entrepreneurship

And then when you do step up from there, eventually you drop the work and now you just have people in you. So you’re the manager. So that is like level three, right? When you are progressing up through this entrepreneurial hierarchy. But I believe there’s another level where you’re just a maker, where someone else can manage the people and you aren’t doing the fulfillment work.

But you are a maker, you’re still creating. And I think that most people in today’s world have to be creating something to succeed. And whatever you create, that’s up to you. In the case of what I’m about to go over, this is a computer programmer. So creating, writing language. Today, a lot of us are knowledge workers.

It’s what comes from our brain that creates things. So you could be creating content for social media, you could be writing blog posts, you could be creating videos, you could just be creating something, you could be creating new resources for your customers that no one will ever see, but only your customers and your clients. But I personally believe that being a maker sits on top of the entrepreneurial hierarchy here.

So what I’m going to read today, you may have read it before and I’m not going to read every bit of it, but it’s called Maker Schedule, Manager Schedule. And it was written by Paul Graham, July 2009. Highly recommend you Google this. If you want to read the whole thing, I’m going to skip some parts.

But he opens up and he says, one reason programmers dislike, and I’m going to stop there because if he’s talking about programmers, just throw in knowledge worker, creator, whatever you are today, because we’re a lot more knowledge worker based these days, most every job as opposed to a factory job or.

A landscaping job or something where it’s very, I need you to plant this tree, I need to clean that countertop, I need you to press this button that those jobs aren’t like they’re still around, but some of those are being replaced by technology. And if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re much more in the needing to use your brainpower more than anything else. So back to this piece that he wrote, he said, one reason programmers dislike meeting so much is that they’re on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.

paul graham on schedules

There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default, you change what you’re doing every hour.

When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them and you’re done. Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command, but there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things like programmers and writers.

They generally prefer to use time in units of a half a day. At least you can write or program well in units of an hour. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started. 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.

Plus, you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour. The only reason is, is, is what? But when someone’s on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it. 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. So there is a little bit more that I’m going to skip over here, but ultimately, start thinking about whether or not you are a maker or a manager, and how you’re utilizing your time. And I’m going to close out with some of his, his paragraphs that he wrote.

And I’m going to close out with some of his, his paragraphs towards the end of this piece. He says, when you’re operating on the manager’s schedule, you can do something you never want to do on the maker’s schedule. You can have speculative meetings, you can meet someone just to get to know one another.

why one meeting ruins my day

If you have an empty slot in your schedule, why not? Maybe it’ll turn out you can keep help one another in some way. And blah, blah, blah. Till recently, we weren’t clear in our own minds about the source of the problem. We just took it for granted that we had either blown our schedules or offended, offend people.

But now that I’ve realized what’s going on, perhaps there’s a third option to write something explaining the two types of schedule. Maybe eventually if the conflict between the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule starts to be more widely understood, it will become less of a problem. And he’s saying the biggest problem is when a maker’s schedule and a manager’s schedule do conflict, right?

When they start hitting up one another, because the manager doesn’t understand they operate in one hour intervals and a maker operates in half day intervals at the least, right? It’s either a full day. I’m working on this or half day. I’m working on this. And people who’ve really created things like whether you’ve written a, written a book or worked on creating content or whatever, you know that this is true.

And so I consider myself a maker. I prefer to be a maker. I still, I’m not at level four where I’m just a maker. I’m still having to manage people and make stuff. I’m more like a level three ish, you know, of the breakdown I gave. But I always say to people openly that I hate meetings. And people think that I just, I hate actually meeting another human being.

Like I don’t want to talk to them and it’s not that. Like when I’m in a meeting, I enjoy being with my team. Like I like my team. I like the people. I like who they are. I like talking to them, getting to know them, catching up with them. I enjoy other human beings. I enjoyed the meeting process, but I don’t enjoy a meeting on the calendar.

If it was Wednesday and I have a full, fully open day on Wednesday to work on anything, but then there’s a meeting at 1130 AM, that’s really, it is. It’s going to ruin my whole day. If I wanted to make something that day, if I wanted to create something that day, it’s going to ruin the whole day because I’ll know that I can’t get too deep into my work because I’ll end up skipping that meeting or missing the meeting or not paying attention.

free buffer focus, my actual week

I’ll end up blowing this person off on accident and I don’t want that. And then after that meeting’s over, I don’t really have enough time to fully create something that I wanted to create. And so that’s why I think that there is a, even an alternate way. And I’ve mentioned on the podcast before, when I went over the book, 10X is easier than 2X.

And that is to follow the entrepreneurial time system to get the best out of all of these worlds. And that’s where you have free days, buffer days, and focus days. Like I said, I’ve covered this on the podcast before, but so I’m going to go over it really fast here. Buffer day, this is where you throw in all that crap, throw in all the meetings, throw in all the little tasks, all the stuff that not that important, but just got to be done.

It’s got to be on the calendar. For me, that’s Monday, Friday. Now, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, typically are maker days or what they, what we’d call in the entrepreneurial time system, a focus day. So I’m just focused on creating something, trying not to put any meetings unless I absolutely have to on one of those days.

And then free days are just days that you’ve planned to take off. Absolutely no work, nothing to do. That is something that you can ultimately try, but I want you to think more about whether or not you’re a maker or a manager and then start to see if you can work some of this entrepreneurial time system, a free buffer and focus days into your schedule to become more productive and really start moving up the hierarchy here.

And I’d also love to hear your thoughts. Are you, do you think that maker is the pinnacle or do you think being a manager is the pinnacle of entrepreneurship? That’s it for this. Try harder.