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July 2009
One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're ona different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost themmore.
There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager'sschedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is forbosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, witheach day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off severalhours
for a single task if you need to, but by default you changewhat you're doing every hour.
When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meetwith someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, andyou're done.
Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's theschedule of command. But there's another way of using time that'scommon among people who make things, like programmers and writers.They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least.You
can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barelyenough time to get started.
When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are adisaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breakingit into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus youhave to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someoneon
the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on thenext hour; the only question is what. But when someone on themaker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.
For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is likethrowing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch fromone task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.
I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meetingcommonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning orafternoon. But in addition there's sometimes a cascading effect.If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I'm slightly lesslikely
to start something ambitious in the morning. I know thismay sound oversensitive, but if you're a maker, think of your owncase. Don't your spirits rise at the thought of having an entireday free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that meansyour spirits
are correspondingly depressed when you don't. Andambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of yourcapacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.
Each type of schedule works fine by itself. Problems arise whenthey meet. Since most powerful people operate on the manager'sschedule, they're in a position to make everyone resonate at theirfrequency if they want to. But the smarter ones restrain themselves,if
they know that some of the people working for them need longchunks of time to work in.
Our case is an unusual one. Nearly all investors, including allVCs I know, operate on the manager's schedule. But
Y Combinatorruns on the maker's schedule. Rtm and Trevor and I do because wealways have, and Jessica does too, mostly, because she's gotteninto sync with us.
I wouldn't be surprised if there start to be more companies likeus. I suspect founders may increasingly be able to resist, or atleast postpone, turning into managers, just as a few decades agothey started to be able to resist switching from jeansto suits.
How do we manage to advise so many startups on the maker's schedule?By using the classic device for simulating the manager's schedulewithin the maker's: office hours. Several times a week I set asidea chunk of time to meet founders we've funded. These chunks
oftime are at the end of my working day, and I wrote a signup programthat ensures all the appointments within a given set of office hoursare clustered at the end. Because they come at the end of my daythese meetings are never an interruption. (Unless their
workingday ends at the same time as mine, the meeting presumably interruptstheirs, but since they made the appointment it must be worth it tothem.) During busy periods, office hours sometimes get long enoughthat they compress the day, but they never interrupt
it.
When we were working on our own startup, back in the 90s, I evolvedanother trick for partitioning the day. I used to program fromdinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one couldinterrupt me. Then I'd sleep till about 11 am, and come in andwork
until dinner on what I called "business stuff." I never thoughtof it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day,one on the manager's schedule and one on the maker's.
When you're operating on the manager's schedule you can do somethingyou'd never want to do on the maker's: you can have speculativemeetings. You can meet someone just to get to know one another.If you have an empty slot in your schedule, why not? Maybe it willturn
out you can help one another in some way.
Business people in Silicon Valley (and the whole world, for thatmatter) have speculative meetings all the time. They're effectivelyfree if you're on the manager's schedule. They're so common thatthere's distinctive language for proposing them: saying that youwant
to "grab coffee," for example.
Speculative meetings are terribly costly if you're on the maker'sschedule, though. Which puts us in something of a bind. Everyoneassumes that, like other investors, we run on the manager's schedule.So they introduce us to someone they think we ought to meet,
orsend us an email proposing we grab coffee. At this point we havetwo options, neither of them good: we can meet with them, and losehalf a day's work; or we can try to avoid meeting them, and probablyoffend them.
Till recently we weren't clear in our own minds about the sourceof the problem. We just took it for granted that we had to eitherblow our schedules or offend people. But now that I've realizedwhat's going on, perhaps there's a third option: to write somethingexplaining
the two types of schedule. Maybe eventually, if theconflict between the manager's schedule and the maker's schedulestarts to be more widely understood, it will become less of aproblem.
Those of us on the maker's schedule are willing to compromise. Weknow we have to have some number of meetings. All we ask from thoseon the manager's schedule is that they understand the cost.
Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston,and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
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