Aug
29
Submitted by Jeffrey on Sat, 2009-08-29 09:35
How do you manage your day-to-day schedule?
A friend just pointed me to this recent post by Paul Graham, about a schedule's impact on the productivity of creative types, "makers" as he calls them.
In short, managers prefer chunking their days into hours, and even half-hour increments. Makers need days, or half days, for most projects. This puts Makers at a disadvantage when managers schedule groups for meetings. Managers need to understand how disruptive their scheduled interruptions can be to productivity (and hence happiness) as a Maker.
It's an excellent post. It shows why most of my days at the office are so very frustrating, and it's not just meetings. Any substantial interruptions have the same effect. It also makes me wonder how I can separate my duties as a manager and maker sufficiently to succeed as a maker. That's where I can make a lasting impression, and its where the fun is! How do you handle your schedule and "thinking time" in a world of managerial time frames?
I experimented with a work schedule earlier this year that would have been wonderful, if people could have respected it. I started work at 7:00am, and worked on my creative projects first thing, until 11:00. I had lunch (usually still in the office, doing whatever) until noon, then "opened for support calls" for the afternoon, until 4:00pm. I left work by 4:30, but didn't take support calls after 4:00.
When this schedule worked, life was dreamy. Starting the day with creative tasks, guarantied that the day was productive. Support calls were more pleasant. Even if I couldn't resolve every specific support issue, the day was still fundamentally a success. But being the only support person for my department, you can guess that it didn't work most of the time. People just have too many emergencies! Interruptions broke my concentration repeatedly until the morning was one big frustration. The afternoons were hardly better.
The real problem wasn't people's support issues (I didn't want to ignore them), it was that I had to answer all of them, from the simplest to the hardest. Most support issues are elementary. Yet even the most petty phone call interrupts important creative work. What I need is a first-line support. So now, I am trying to hire some student employees to be on the front lines, taking calls and (hopefully) completing most day-to-day support tasks without interrupting me.
Finding Paul's post just buoyed me up. I'm adding it to my proposal, as supporting testimony—along with this post by BYU's CIO, Kelly Flanagan, about acquiring needless stuff. That's a topic for another post, but it relates because many of my responsibilities are delegated ideas and leftover responsibilities, "stuff" that shouldn't exist in the first place. Dejunking the department responsibilities and procedures would lift everyone's spirits and make everyone more productive.
