Are you a maker or a manager?
In most companies, you can broadly categorise people into those who create (makers) and those who coordinate (managers). While this isn’t a perfect divide, most people in an organisation often lean more toward one side than the other, in how they structure their work. Some roles blend both, but understanding these two modes of work can still help us design better, more thoughtful meetings, and even get rid of some altogether.
Personally I’ve found this framework (distinction between makers and managers) to be extremely useful, and can add incredible value towards ensuring your meeting culture enhances, rather than disrupts productivity.
Let’s dig in a little deeper:
Understanding Makers and Managers
Who Are Makers?
Most references I came across on the interwebs regarding Makers place them in a knowledge worker category. However, this is a little narrow as the category is far larger. A more helpful and accurate description of a maker is:
Anyone whose work relies on uninterrupted focus and deep concentration, whether they’re writing code, designing a product, assembling machinery, or preparing food in a kitchen.
This broadens the category to rightfully include roles like: carpenters, electricians, plumbers, welders, factory workers, machinists, chefs, bakers, data entry and processing specialists, accountants, bookkeepers, lab technicians, pharmacists, receptionists and executive assistants, etc.
While some of these roles are ‘pure makers’, who require a deep focus, there are also those with ‘blended roles’, who do both focused and reactive tasks.
A more simple way to think about this is: you’re a maker if you thrive on sustained concentration and are hindered by interruptions.
Who Are Managers?
Traditionally, a ‘manager’ refers to someone in a formal leadership role – team leads, department heads, executives – whose time is dominated by:
- Meetings
- Coordination
- Decision-making
- Oversight of others’ work
Similarly to the maker definition above, that’s a very narrow slice of who really functions in a managerial mode in the context of this framework. If we think of managers less by job title and more by how they spend their time and what their work depends on, then manager-mode work includes people who:
- Spend much of their day in meetings, emails, and chats, often reacting to or making decisions
- Serve as connectors, keeping communication flowing between people or departments
- Prioritise responsiveness, availability, and multitasking over long stretches of focus
- Are often measured by how quickly they respond, organise, or resolve issues and not by creating something tangible
With that as a backdrop, roles that fall Into manager-mode (even if not managers by title) include: team leaders and supervisors (blue-collar and white-collar), project coordinators, customer support leaders, human resource professionals, office managers, receptionists and front-desk roles (whose work is highly interrupt-driven and communication-focused), salespeople, account managers (who coordinate, communicate, and negotiate all day), etc.
In short then, whether or not someone has ‘manager’ in their title, the key difference lies in the nature of their work. If your day is built around calls, check-ins, decisions, and coordination, then you’re operating in manager-mode. If your value comes from deep focus and uninterrupted creation, you’re in maker mode. Many people blend both, but understanding which mode you’re in helps clarify how and which meetings help or hurt.
The Conflict Between Makers and Managers
The conflict around meetings for these two roles arises because makers need long focus periods, while managers thrive in a structured, meeting-driven workflow. When managers schedule meetings, they often disrupt the deep work that makers rely on.
The Impact of Meetings on Makers
Paul Graham’s ‘Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule’
The ‘maker v manager’ framework above was first floated by Tech investor Paul Graham in an influential essay in 2009 titled ‘Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.’ As you’ve read, it’s deceptively simple but profoundly helpful.
Makers need half-day or full-day blocks of time
For a maker, time isn’t just a resource, it’s a rhythm. A 30-minute meeting can cost them 3 hours, not because the meeting is long, but because it breaks their mental stride.
Managers work in hourly increments.
For a manager, a meeting isn’t an interruption, it’s the heartbeat of their day. It’s how decisions get made and people stay aligned.
The Real Problem is when these two schedules collide
Most workplace friction around meetings isn’t personal, it’s architectural. We’ve built our calendars around one kind of work, and asked everyone else to squeeze themselves into it.
When a manager schedules a meeting, it’s a quick check-in. To the maker, it’s a bomb dropped in the middle of their focus window. Even well-meaning meetings at 11 AM or 2 PM can cut a maker’s day in half, rendering both halves unproductive.
Here are two reasons that meetings impact on makers:
There’s a Cost to Context Switching
Research shows that switching between tasks incurs a cognitive cost, requiring time and mental energy to re-engage. Even a 30-minute meeting can disrupt hours of deep work.
Meetings can Disrupt Deep Work
Based on Cal Newport’s Deep Work, focus-intensive work leads to higher-quality output. Meetings break concentration and create fragmented workdays for makers.
The Result
- Makers grow resentful of unnecessary or scattered meetings
- Managers become frustrated by perceived unresponsiveness or lack of engagement
- Work slows down not because people are lazy, but because schedules are misaligned
- When a maker is pulled into a manager’s schedule, their efficiency drops significantly
Where This Gets Even More Complicated: Blended Roles
As I mentioned earlier, there are many people who don’t fit purely into one mode. For example, a senior designer may have deep focus work but also lead client presentations. Or a team lead may be expected to both code and coordinate.
These people suffer twice because they’re expected to do deep work and attend constant meetings. That’s why they often feel burnt out or ineffective, and can cause ‘mode-switching fatigue’, simply because there is a very real cognitive and emotional toll of jumping between manager and maker modes too frequently.
Strategies for Minimising and Optimising Meetings
For Managers: Rethinking Meetings
There is a growing list of strategies for minimising and optimising meetings. Here are a few:
- Batch Meetings: Schedule meetings in the afternoon, leaving mornings for deep work. Alternatively meet with the team and discuss which parts of the day make for more efficient working time and meeting time.
- Use Asynchronous Communication: Leverage emails, Slack, et al, and recorded updates instead of real-time meetings.
- Allow Opt-Outs: Not everyone needs to be in every meeting. Sometimes we allow the spirit of inclusiveness to get in the way of who really needs to be at the meeting.
- Set Clear Agendas & Decision Points: Define the meeting purpose and expected outcomes beforehand. Send these out to everyone. Not only does it give attendees a sense of what to expect, it also allows them to better prepare to ensure a more productive meeting.
- Timeboxing: Set strict meeting time limits (e.g., no meeting should exceed 30 minutes). Don’t allow the default setting in your calendar to dictate the meeting length. If you only need a 15 minute meeting, then have a 15 minute meeting.
- Conduct a Meeting Audit: Regularly assess and eliminate unnecessary meetings.
For Makers: Protecting Focus Time
Makers can’t simply wait for or rely on managers to make all of the changes needed. If you’re a maker for whom deep work is important for your output, you could try some of the following:
- Block Off “Maker Time”: Schedule uninterrupted focus periods in the calendar. I often place ‘Deep Work’ blocks into my calendar and schedule meetings around those.
- Proactively Decline Unnecessary Meetings: Push back on meetings that don’t contribute to key goals. That’s going to requite you asking for agendas and decision points in advance. If your manager doesn’t already do this, you may be a great catalyst to this change.
- Suggest Alternative Communication: Propose written updates or voice messages instead. Just because ‘we’ve always worked and communicated like this’ doesn’t mean we have to going forward, especially if you can show far greater outputs and efficiency for everyone.
- Come Prepared: If a meeting is necessary, ensure it’s as short and effective as possible. Too many people are guilty of not preparing sufficiently to ensure a quality meeting. Again this is an opportunity to influence the meeting culture in your organisation.
- Advocate for Change: Educate managers on the impact of meetings on deep work. Remember, it’s not just about you. Helping managers and other makers understand this framework is good for everyone’s health and output.
Building a Meeting-Conscious Culture
There’s a growing call from almost everyone for better meetings. Each organisation should have its own culture of what a meeting looks like, what it’s used for and how it’s run. Personally I think organisations should have a ‘sacred book of meetings’ that everyone is given and schooled in, when joining the organisation.
- Educate Teams: Share resources on effective meeting management, and your ‘sacred book of meetings’.
- Encourage Asynchronous Workflows: Use digital tools to facilitate collaboration without meetings. Not all communication needs to happen with everyone present in the moment (synchronous). Understanding the when synchronous and asynchronous communication should happen goes a long way to create a more productive and effective meeting culture.
- Empower Makers: Part of your meeting culture should encourage makers to schedule focus or deep work time without interruptions. This gives them more autonomy and permission to decline meetings that get in the way of work flow.
- Measure Meeting Effectiveness: Track meeting duration, attendance, and impact. I often wonder what might happen if we rated meeting callers / owners and meeting attendees on their effectiveness?
Conclusion
The friction between makers and managers isn’t about who works harder, it’s about how differently we work. Makers need space for focus; managers need space for coordination. When we impose one schedule on everyone, we set ourselves up for frustration, inefficiency, and missed potential.
Makers and managers live in different worlds. One needs deep focus, the other thrives on constant coordination, and too often, the meeting calendar forgets that. The result? Wasted time, broken flow, and burned-out teams. It doesn’t have to be this way. When we recognise these different modes of work and start designing our days, and our meetings, with intention, we create space for both creative focus and smart collaboration. Maybe it’s time we stopped asking everyone to work the same way, and instead asked: what kind of work are we trying to protect?
The Meeting is Dead, Long Live the Meeting
If you’d like to explore how to improve the meeting culture in your business, organisation, country, school, family or relationship, I’ve got a presentation for that.
Let me know. I’d love to chat with you about how I can assist you.
