paulgraham.com, July 2009
One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.
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'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 another thing to hold in your head.
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.
A meeting in the afternoon could mean that you never really get the morning going. If you know you have a meeting at 3pm, you don't start something ambitious at 1pm. You know it'll be interrupted. So you do something less important instead. And the whole day is less productive.
I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or an afternoon.
When you're operating on the manager's schedule, meetings are commonplace, even pleasant. But when you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a catastrophe.
The collision between these two modes of working is a massive source of organizational dysfunction. Managers don't understand why their most productive people seem resentful about a "quick 30-minute sync." Makers don't understand why managers seem to think their time is infinitely divisible.
The solution is simple but requires awareness: if you run a company, understand that some of your people operate on the maker's schedule. Don't scatter their days with meetings. Give them long, unbroken stretches of time.
The most productive companies I've seen—including many of the most successful startups funded by Y Combinator—have figured this out. They cluster meetings at the edges of the day and protect the core hours.
How you structure time is how you structure thinking. If you want deep work, you must protect deep time.