Paul Graham had another article back in 2009 about the Maker’s Schedule vs Manager’s Schedule.

That is a very good observation. “What you do changes very hour” is exactly why people complain the company is getting inefficient. People complaining about the meetings, but actually, they are not complaining the total time spent on meetings, they are complaining that the meetings cut their time into smaller chunk that does not work. Paul even went so far to claim that founders should resist, or at least postpone to become managers.

I wrote about What We can Learn from Travelers, and I listed some difference between a traveller and a resident. I should act one thing: Traveler always have a traveler’s schedule, which is very different from the daily routine of most of our lives. It is more like a manager’s schedule but more intense. They have limited time (few days for most people), and by definition, travel means to put as many, and as diversified things as possible into their schedule. They have to run by hours, and sometimes by 10 minutes.

For a business traveler, it is the same. It turned out that as traveler, it is so easy to have “speculative” meetings – the meetings with not expected output, and just drop by and say “hi”. That is so nicely fit into a business traveler’s schedule, just like a tourism drop by at the Milano Duomo and say hi to the church. However, it is so disastrous for some of the local people, especially the makers. We need to be aware of that.

That schedule works perfectly for a traveler, and that makes us exciting. We can accomplish much more (well, in terms of numbers, not total impact) than people running maker’s schedule. We need that, from time to time.