I read a fascinating post the other day about the difference between a manager’s schedule and a maker’s schedule. Here’s the gist of it:

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 half a day at least. 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 question is what. But when someone 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.

Naturally, this made me think of academe. (What else do I think about, you ask? Good question.)

The problem of both

One of the challenges of academia is you’re never just a manager or just a maker — you’re both.

In your role as teacher, adviser, and administrator, you’re on manager time. Tasks can usually be broken down into half-hour intervals, and often we’re grateful to break them down into shorter intervals just to put some boundaries around them and avoid drowning. (See: grading.) Meetings abound, and you’re generally running hither and yon with a few stops to chat with people doing the same.

In your role as researcher, however, you’re on maker time. Sure, running a database search for relevant articles may be able to fit into manager time, but brainstorming, reading, thinking, and writing are all tasks that work best when you’ve got nice chunky slots of uninterrupted time.

Which means it’s kind of no wonder that most academics bemoan an inability to get research done. It’s not just avoidance or bad time-management. It’s a lack of the kind of time that best allows for getting that work done.

Yes, people do manage it

I know some rockin’ mama professors who manage to schedule time and work on their research and writing with focus — and they get a lot done. If you can do that, power to you.

If, however, you need longer stretches of time in order to get momentum on your project, knowing that is half the solution.

The other half is finding / making those stretches of time appear at regular intervals.

Planning, planning, planning

It’s easy to get caught up in the “as soon as I do X” sort of thinking. As soon as I’m done with this grading, I’ll make time. As soon as I’m off of this committee, I’ll make time. As soon as this personal problem resolves, I’ll make time.

The problem is that this isn’t so much “making” time as “finding” time — and believing in a mythical future when there won’t be as many demands on the time you do have.

That may work in the “as soon as the semester is over and I can hibernate for three months” situation, and in fact, frontloading all other work during the school year and keeping the summer free for research works for many people. (Beware the need to teach for summer salary, however.)

But if summer brings kids home from school or the need to teach or family obligations or whatever, then making time is your best bet.

That might mean setting aside one day a week for research and writing. It may mean sitting down on Sunday night and blocking out a morning or afternoon (whatever happens to work that week) and planning to get tasks done around it. It may mean clustering other tasks and activities so that stretches of time previously full become available.

Just how you, personally, will create maker time for your maker activities, will be unique to you and your life and priorities. But making time for your inner maker can relieve a lot of the “but I should be getting more writing done!” stress that’s endemic in the halls of the academy — and you’ll get more done, to boot.